To travel to Chamonix, from Brussels, I booked a seat on a Eurolines coach, boarding by Gare du Nord. One of the main advantages of travelling by bus, is the low carbon footprint. Buses are generally light and do not use much fuel per person. They can also be quite cheap. I noted that the tickets from Brussels to Chamonix start at 9 Euros one way, shame mine wasn’t quite that cheap, I actually paid 90 Euros return, but had no extra fees for baggage etc.
Eurolines coach
I departed the Euro lines bus station at 18h00 on Sunday,after checking in a good sized bag and a snowboard in a bag. From what I read on the website for Eurolines Belgium, they don’t accept skis and snowboards, but the crew stowed mine in the baggage locker. Just don’t go turning up expecting them to accept your winter sports equipment in Belgium. If you are travelling from the UK then it is no problem. It all boils down to the fact that each country has a different coach operator badged as Eurolines operating their part of Europe. The journey was uneventful. We drove out of Brussels and on to Lille in France, a DVD was shown as we left Brussels, then another DVD on the leg from Lille to Paris.
Most of the passengers alighted at Paris and new passengers boarded, some with skis in carry bags. It was now about 11h00,so now more DVD’s were played. The coach then travelled down the Autoroutes headed for Geneva, but stopping for a break every 2 hours or so. Fortunately the coach was half empty so everyone had two seats each to try top get comfortable on for the night. I did manage to sleep in a number of unusual positions before waking after about half an hour each time.
As we went through the Jura, I noticed that the scenery looked very white, I was having difficulty making out why as I had removed my contact lenses for the night. It soon became apparent that it was snowing heavily. The bus stopped at the border at Switzerland and all passports were checked. There was a short stop at Geneva and then we headed back for France and Chamonix.
Chamonix, my destination
It was just getting light as we entered the Chamonix valley. It looked magnificent with its new covering of fresh snow. The coach had difficulty with the build up of snow on the streets of Chamonix, but managed to get to the bus stop outside the railway station.
I was tired most of Monday and slept really well on Monday night. Would I travel by coach again? Yes, in fact I have to on my return leg. It would be good to find some of those 9 euro seats and may well look out for them.
Tags: brussels, bus, chamonix, coach, Eurolines, low carbon footprint
I wrote an earlier post to voice the things that annoyed me most on Twitter. The new Lists function allows me to create my own targeted streams. If find that a member of that list is publishing spam, being offensive, or just tweeting multiple Tweets that are not of interest tome, then all I need do is simply drop them from my list. The list I read the most is a Private List.
Twitter Team List
As it is new, it has thrown many of those into SEO, and marketing into a spin. My view is that lists are there for the Twitter members, not for the marketers. At this moment many of us have produced lists. I find them refreshing, as they enable me to find many new Tweeple. I foresee that many lists will be created and followed. However, being listed on a large number of Public Lists may not be an accurate measure of popularity. If my favourite lists are my private ones, then how many other Twitter members will also have private lists as their most used. There will be no statistics for being on someone’s Private List.
I feel that the follower count as a measure of credibility is dead, but the number of listings is also likely to be unreliable as the most important listings could well be on Private Lists. It is also obvious to me that, there is absolutely no point in following anyone who will not follow you back. Following and being Followed allows the members to exchange DM’s, it is not needed to read someone’s Tweets.
I suspect that many will follow Public Lists and in doing so find Tweeple we like to follow and perhaps include them in our own private lists. We might then stop following that Public List. An exception to this would be Lists that are revised constantly through interaction by the Curator of that list or by feedback from followers.
Improving Lists
The Twitter Application, Twibes provides the means to read Tweets from a group of Twitter Members on a specific theme or subject. Only Tweets containing one of three keywords gets posted in the Twibe stream. Currently the negative feature of Twibes is that there is no list function therefore you have to take read every Twibe members Tweets as long as they contain a keyword. Twibes will be integrating with lists, so this likely to be addressed. So, what does this mean for Twitter? In my own case I Tweet on at least three different topics but followers of my Tweets may only be interested in one of the topics. It would be great if there was a way of filtering a List Stream by keywords. I am not sure how practical that would be. Perhaps someone could comment and let me know?
Twitter - the Future
These are my current views. I’m sure they will evolve with Twitter. Where do you see the future, especially with Google Wave being rolled out?
PS Matt here is your Pingback
Tags: future, Twiiter, Twiiter Lists. List, views
Twitter is an excellent tool if used responsibly. I am fairly new to the Twittersphere, but already I am finding some activities very annoying. Here is my Top 10 Terrible Tweets on Twitter.
Spoof Twitter profile
10. I am not going to start with Tweets but Profiles. How many times do you read; “I am an expert at SEO, Web2.0, blah, blah, blah. My site is rated No1 on blah , blah , blah”?
Come on who are you trying to kid? If you were that good, you would not be posting tweets with links to your site. If you are that good, then go and spend time with your family and let someone else Tweet for your company!
9.”I am listening to “Your song” on Blah.FM”.
To be honest I don’t care. All you are doing is Tweeting a plug for the online radio station. Now if you were to Tweet “Listening to: “I fought the Law, by the Clash”; I am reliving that failed bank raid, I carried out”. Then it might well catch my attention!
8. “Good morning, Thank you and welcome to all my new followers who joined over night”.
I really don’t like this. It comes across only a little better than the auto DM’s sent to new followers. This is just the thing that those operating pyramid follow schemes post everyday.
7. “RT @twitrant New web page: How Twitter can change the world. http;//www.twitrant.com/change_the_world.htm”
ReTweeting masses of Tweets to inflate your number of updates. Unless your followers are likely to be interested in a Tweet, don’t do it. If you can, say why you liked that the Tweet you are ReTweeting.
6. “ @twitrant New web page: How Twitter can change the world. http;//www.twitrant.com/change_the_world.htm Please Retweet this”.
Asking followers for ReTweets, MrTweets, followfridays, Stumbles. etc. I’m sure I don’t need to explain this. If the Tweets are good, then they will get Re Tweeted and if we think Tweeple or their web sites are worthy of recommendations, we will give them. Its a sure sign of a commercial outfit, when they ask for this.
5. “New web page: How Twitter can change the world. http;//www.twitrant.com/change_the_world.htm”
Twitter streams that are nothing more than an RSS feed of their owners web site. So you joined Twitter, but can’t actually be bothered to Tweet about anything, so instead you add a widget to your site to automatically Tweet your web pages. Sorry, you will have to try harder.
4. “Pandemic of copied news headlines”
Looking up the news sites and posting the latest news headline. There are a few Tweeple that do this every single day. They just get a news headline, make a TinyURL , then Tweet it. No thinking required.
My browser already has a BBC News Headlines button so I don’t need your Tweeted copy. Now if you were to give your reaction or feelings to that news maybe I would be interested.
3. “Look how wonderful I am, I have 2000 followers”.
Don’t you realise that all you need to do to get followers is to find out those who will most likely follow you back and follow them? Of course its also bad form to brag.
2. “A quotation on Twitter only needs Control C and Control V - John Williams 2009″.
Excessive use of quotations annoys me and I believe Twitter, as they have suspended accounts for excessive use. Looking up quotations is real easy on the Internet. Unless your quotation describes how you feel at a particular moment or reinforces a point, then don’t Tweet them. A long list of your favourite quotations just wastes bandwidth. Furthermore, as internet servers have quite substantial carbon footprints, they are hastening climate chaos.
1. “Click on the link and you’ll get thousands of followers”.
There are lots of pyramid follow schemes available for Twitter. As I said before all you need to do to get followers is to follow people, who will follow you back. Then you could have thousands are even hundreds of thousands following you. However you could also be following thousands of Tweeple as well. What good is that?
That’s my rant over. Actually, Twitter can be very useful and will only improve as stream filtering produces more relevant Tweets to your likes. Twibes seems like a good start in this direction, with Tweets grouped by like minded people and including up to three keywords. I am hopeful that Twitter will be an even better experience in the future. Which Tweets annoy you on Twitter? Where do you see the future of Twitter?
Tags: cut and paste, quotations, terrible, tweets, Twitter
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