Monthly Archives: May 2009
My Photo of Magic Fountain is on Schmap!
| May 29, 2009 | Posted by Angela under My Travel Adventures, The Arts, Film, Music, Fashion |
I use Flickr to store all my photos – all 7702 of them! Wow, I can’t believe I have that many photos. And no, they are not all photos of me hanging around with friends. They are mostly of my travel adventures and social events. I love Flickr because it’s so easy to share photos, add tags, organize them and most importantly they have API’s where developers can build applications that work with Flickr. I have used Blurb and Trippermap, both apps I wouldn’t have known about until Flickr. I really love their service.
Since I am able to tag my photos, they can be searched on. I received an email from Schmap saying that my photo of the Magic Fountain (Font de Montjuic) in Barcelona has been short-listed for inclusion in the seventh edition of the Schmap Barcelona Guide, to be published early June 2009.
What is Schmap I wondered? I understood that they were a travel guide but I received a better definition by looking them up on Wikipedia:
Schmap is the publisher of free digital travel guides for destinations throughout Europe and the USA, as well as Canada, Australia and New Zealand.[1] The company’s travel guides are available for download at www.schmap.com, along with a small computer program that interacts with a Web browser to display the guides called the Schmap Player.[2]
There are currently[when?] 199 city or island guides available for download from Schmap, purportedly more than the number offered by traditional paper guidebook publishers Frommers, Lonely Planet, and Fodors as individual city or island guides.[3]
The Schmap Guides are entirely free to consumers, with Schmap relying on sales from its travel store, advertising, and licensing revenue from its commercial customers for financial support
Cool, I thought. I would love to have my photo used for their travel guide. I signed the agreement to allow my photo to be published in their travel guide. Two weeks later, I was notified that my photo was chosen.
Please note: I am not a professional photographer and don’t aspire to be. I do love to travel though and I love to capture images that sometimes I know I may only see once in my life.
When I was in college, I studied in Seville, Spain in the Spring of 2003. I vowed to myself that once I graduate from college, I would return. I graduated in 2005 and the week after I walked the stage, I headed back to Spain with my mom and sister for a 2 week vacation. Barcelona was our first stop and actually the Magic Fountain was the first monument we saw. I remember that day so clearly. We were all 3 jet-lagged but hungry. We went to a little tapas restaurant near the Magic Fountain. The clouds were coming in as if it was going to rain. We walked down to the Magic Fountain right at dusk and just in time to see the lights turn on in the fountain. It was beautiful! I only had my little Canon PowerShot S410 but it captured the fountain perfectly.
I am glad my photo is being shared on Schmap. I hope many others will have the opportunity to visit Magic Fountain and enjoy this beautiful sight.
Google recognizes a San Antonio 6th grader
| May 21, 2009 | Posted by Angela under Business & Technology, The Arts, Film, Music, Fashion, Why I like San Antonio, Words of Inspiration & Motivation |
I am sure everyone has already heard about this but I had to post about it because I just think it’s so cool. Google runs a contest called “Doodle 4 Google.” It’s a competition that invites K-12 grade students to reinvent Google’s homepage logo around a preselected theme.
Doodle 4 Google is a competition where we invite K-12 students to reinvent Google’s homepage logo. Both our country and our world are undergoing significant change and this year we invited students to doodle around the theme “What I Wish for the World”. At Google we believe in thinking big, and dreaming big, and we can’t think of anything more important than encouraging students to do the same.
And the winner? Christin Engelberth, a 6th grader from Bernard A. Harris Jr High School right here in San Antonio Texas. She titled her’s a “A New Beginning”:
The logo is being displayed today on Google’s homepage where millions of visitors come from all over the world. Christin will receive a $15,000 college scholarship, a laptop, and a $25,000 technology grant for her school.
She has been featured on many news websites including CNN:
Good job Christin! Way to represent San Antonio, your school and most importantly, yourself. This is awesome news and news we need to hear about more often. There are kids doing wonderful things out there and they need to be recognized.
I applaud Google for developing a program that recognizes our youth for their talent and creativity. We need more companies to be doing things like this. We also need to encourage our youth to search for competitions, programs and contests that challenge them to use their brains.
I am going to print this story and take it my class at Garner middle school, where I am a Junior Achievement volunteer. I want our kids to know that there are programs out there where they can get recognized for their talents. I hope this story will inspire them.
My 1st Social Media Club Breakfast
| May 21, 2009 | Posted by Angela under Business & Technology, Local Places & Events |
I joined the San Antonio Social Media Club a few months back but hadn’t had the chance to attend an event yet. Today was my first breakfast event. It’s basically a meet and greet and then you will have a guest speaker to discuss a topic of interest. Today, Luis Sandoval (@pandaran) spoke about how to manage all your social media tools. This is key because there are so many platforms out there and it can be so overwhelming to try to keep up with everything. You don’t want to just join everything and simply have a presence but not be active, that defeats the purpose of social networking. They key is finding communities that give you the most bang for your buck. What are you trying to accomplish? Answering this question should help you find the communities you want to be a part of. Not everything is for everyone and it is imperative to recognize this or you will find yourself wasting your precious time messing with something that brings no value to you or others.
Following the speech, there is an open forum for Q&A. I noticed that people still struggle with understanding the purpose of Twitter. Companies don’t want their employees wasting time on these social media platforms. That is not a Twitter issue. That is a company culture issue. If you breed a bottom up culture, a culture where your customers are the star, a company where your employees feel like entrepreneurs – Twitter is an open door opportunity. Those companies that aren’t accepting Twitter are leaving that door closed because they are too scared to see what is on the other side. If you aren’t on Twitter, your competitors are.
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