NewYorkTraveler.net Gets a New Logo!

After a year’s hiatus while we gutted and renovated our 1855 home in Upstate New York, the Mecomber team is back on the trail! My itinerary is a bit scattered this season, but it’ll be fun. I’m going to focus on a few places that have been getting media attention lately– places that may not be open to the public for much longer due to New York State budget cuts. I’m concerned that these place will close before I have had the chance to see them and write about them. One place in particular is the Nicholas Herkimer Home in Little Falls, NY.

We also intend on going camping for a bit in the Adirondacks (going to need plenty of bug spray for that). And we’ll be taking a few adventures out of state, too. We visited my brother in Virginia a few weeks ago– what a wonderful trip! I also visited Hill Cumorah and the old Joseph Smith homestead in February (I’ll have stories about that posted very soon). I’ll be going to Indianapolis this summer, and we do plan another trip to Virginia sometime. Not to mention all the amazing things we’re going to do in New York, like (hopefully) see a Civil War enactment in Peterboro and get to Saratoga to see Freeman’s Farm and Fort Ticonderoga. Of course, if any of you have suggestions, feel free to leave a comment.

In celebration of all this new activity, I’ve developed a “brand” for the blog, replete with t-shirts and car magnets! What do you think?

I’m planning on updating the blog theme, too, to reflect the new logo. This may take a little time, but I’m hoping that with the onset of a new year, New York Traveler will have a new look!

Making Your Traveling Hobby Work For You

I will soon see my fifth anniversary as a travel blogger, this July! I just can’t believe it. Has it truly been that long? We started blogging about our travels in July 2006. Before then, we’d visited so many enjoyable places that I longed for a way to journalize them. I started up a little blog on Blogger; two years later I bought my own domain here, and the rest is history.

When I first started, we were a one-income family trying to squeeze out the cash for gas and admissions. Traveling with a large family can be very expensive, so I looked for some way to earn a little money on the side, to pay for gas and travel expenses. I had no idea that I would not only be Making money blogging for travel expenses, but I have been able to build an entire career around blogging and traveling and freelance writing. It’s been nothing short of thrilling.

Of course, I was a rookie– and therefore I had to learn most everything by trial and error. Even 5 years ago, blogging (especially professional blogging) was an anomaly. Today, however, the tables have turned. Today, there are even college offering courses on blogging and Making money blogging. If only I had had such opportunities then!

Ashworth College is offering online courses in blogging and Making money blogging with an accredited Professional Blogging Career Diploma. It looks like a phenomenal course. Lord willing, if I have time, I just may take it. Even though I am experienced, there’s still a lot to learn. And blogging is an ever-changing venue. I remember “back in the olden days” when blogs were primarily textual!

If you are a budding young blogger or traveler, maybe you’d like to check out the course. I have loved the journey– both traveling AND blogging. It’s been a marvelous adventure. Here’s to many more years.

Happy trails.

Thoughts on the Associated Press Story

Note to Readers: This is not a travel post. Haha!

Earlier today on my other blog, I ranted about the FTC Bill (coming up for passage this summer). I wanted to write a little about it here, because there are a LOT of misconceptions about the issue. Firstly, the 86-page bill is here (it’s a pdf file). The bill makes a big deal about the reliability and needed oversight of “new media” (that’s us, fellow bloggers) when it comes to truth in advertising laws. Now, I will state that I am JUST FINE with truth in advertising– I have no problem with that. Rather, these are some of the issues I have with this FTC bill:

1. Blogs are OPINION forums.
The FTC desires to regulate opinions?! What will happen if one of my opinions is considered “wrong” or “misleading” by someone who has other opinions? Will I be targeted, simply because I have a blog?

2. I OWN my blogs. It’s MY private property.
This is a lot different than that “store clerk” parable that is being thrown around these days:

“If you walk into a department store, you know the (sales) clerk is a clerk,” said Rich Cleland, assistant director in the FTC’s division of advertising practices. “Online, if you think that somebody is providing you with independent advice and … they have an economic motive for what they’re saying, that’s information a consumer should know.”

The guidelines also would bring uniformity to a community that has shunned that.

This is a horribly poor allegory for sponsored posts on blogs. I OWN my blogs, I am an independent contractor, and this is MY space. A more appropriate allegory would be that of celebrity endorsement. We’ve all seen them, ever since I Love Lucy or The Honeymooners. How about Kim Komando and her GoToMyPC.com? Laura Ingraham and her Select Sleep Number Bed? Rush Limbaugh and his new GM SUV? Will they be required to hoist large placards over their heads, informing addle-brained consumers that their endorsement or product name-drop is sponsored? No! And how about movie makers with their “paid for” insertions of products and product names in movies (remember E.T.’s Reese’s Pieces?)! The movie makers get paid BIG bucks for dropping brand-names into their films. Do you think the Feds are going after them? NO!

But bloggers, who earn a measly $5-8 per sponsored post will have to do it– or be SUED or JAILED by the Feds! It’s unconscionable.

3. This bill, if passed into law, is unenforceable.
Here’s an example: on this blog, I write product reviews. Probably 80% of the product reviews I do on this blog are MY OWN. I don’t get paid for them. I just love doing product reviews. It’s WHY one of my blogs is called, uh, Freaky FRUGALite. I have a readership of educated, frugal moms and dads, and this is why I write about what I do. DUH!! Is the FTC going to sue me for this post about trying out Montezuma Cranberry Wine? I liked it and it has some certain health benefits for me. What am I to do if some addled-brained idiot buys the stuff and gets sick from it or doesn’t get any health benefit?? And how can I prove that I was never paid to write about Montezuma Wine– how on earth can I prove a negative?! I’m doing it for ME and for my readers– it’s part information and part entertainment, and the American people aren’t SO stupid so as to believe otherwise.

4. SEPs vs SEDPs: I think there should be “Stupid Laws” on the books.
If you read a blog post about how a vitamin is going to make you fly like Superman, and you buy that vitamin believing that you can now fly like Supermen, then YOU should be sued, for being such a stupid idiot! I think it’s high time Smart, Enterprising People (SEPs) had some defending here, against the Stupid, Easily-Duped People (SEDPs). The SEDs have been pandered too and coddled for tooo long. It’s about time they reaped some consequences here.

5. Next thing you know, we’ll have to have a Fairness Doctrine for blogs….!
Yeah, this is such a slippery slope! The Feds could tighten the screws, forcing us bloggers to abide by the idiotic Fairness Doctrine. Next thing you know, I won’t be able to write about Hoover vacuum cleaners unless I am “fair” and also write about Dyson vacs in the same sentence! All in the name of “fairness”! GRRRRRR!

6. Bloggers are independent thinkers, and we don’t want government-sponsored “uniformity.”
In the REAL world, that kind of uniformity is called “SLAVERY.” It’s called DEATH TO FREE ENTERPRISE, to CREATIVITY and to INNOVATION.

Finally, I like what John Dvorak had to say about this. (He’s a blogger, by the way, and he did not PAY ME to say this- happy now, FTC?):

This is like the government, in cahoots with the RIAA, going after some mom in Ohio for stupidly leaving Kazaa running on her machine and discovering she’s been a transit point for the “Best of Bee Gee’s” for the past two years. Meanwhile, the Asian mobs off the Indonesian coast are cranking out commercial counterfeit CDs by the millions. Do something about that first before you go after the oh-so-dangerous mom in Ohio.

The same holds true here. I could care less that Milly the Yarn Spinner at millysworldofyarn.com is getting free samples of yarn to review on her blog. Has she disclosed it was free yarn? Will she return the sweaters she knits from the yarn? Who cares?

We do not need the FTC looking into Milly when there are large corporations ripping off the public every day. The community of bloggers can make Milly miserable for her misleading review, but the public can do little about financial scams, major price fixing, overbilling by the phone companies, or any number of big scams. Where is the FTC?

Because the FTC so willfully ignores the obvious, most eggregious lawbreakers, and because they are instead turning their attentions to the Little Guy and the Mom Blogger, I find this bill very suspicious. It makes me really, really wonder about who is “sponsoring” this bill… where’s the FTC’s truth in advertising, huh? Who are the people pushing for this regulation?

And here’s a note to you Blog Purists who remain arrogantly unspotted by the evil taint of sponsored content– go your way to please your virginal readers with your pure and blameless content… go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel, nor your approval. Be merry in your own little immaculate niches, and pay us dirty thieves no mind. If you believe that your content is somehow better than ours merely because of the lack of sponsored posts, that’s just fine with us. Go away now, and be merry. You’ll not be missed, anyway…

Speed Up Your Typing mph

I’m reading this very cool book about how computers and networks work. It’s not filled with techno-babble, not at all! (lots of pictures, lol). I like how the book begins with the history of telecommunications– first the telegraph, then the telephone, then the teletype, and the computer and its network. Communication methods are constantly changing. It made me think of the speech-recognition software I’ve been learning about, Dragon Naturally Speaking. This software looks so cool, and it is obviously natural that speech-recognition software is the latest leap in communications technology. One of my blogging friends, Owen, recently made a short video showing off the software. In the past, Owen has helped me out of some technology jams with my blogs; he has a great way of explaining things. Watch the video and see Dragon Naturally Speaking at work.

Pretty neat! Dragon Naturally Speaking is having a special promotion (and it’s just in time for the holidays). Click one of the links below and type in the coupon code DNSMSBG. You can get $25 to $50 off the software. The coupon code is exclusive only to these links here; they won’t work anywhere else!

• 25% off Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 Preferred
• 25% off Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard
• 10% off MacSpeech Dictate

Brett Bumeter, a blogger acquaintance of mine, explains exactly how this software works. And by the way, everything written below was “typed” using the speech-recognition software, Dragon Naturally Speaking.

Hello my name is Brett Bumeter and I would like to introduce you to Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 is a program that enables you to type with your voice by speaking out loud. All you have to do is speak in a normal voice at a normal rate of speed, and your computer will capture every word that you say almost. The program claims to have about 99% accuracy, and it’s been my experience using the program over the last two years through versions nine and version 10 that this claim is extremely accurate.

The program is extremely fast whether you’re using a noise canceling microphone headset plugged into your computer or whether you’re using a pocket MP3 recorder. I actually use both setups and have had great success having my voice and words turned into text by typing them into my computer, as well as using my voice to turn my words into an MP3 file on my MP3 recorder which I can then import into my computer via USB, and have Dragon NaturallySpeaking transcribe those words automatically into text while the computer does something else.

Right now I am writing this particular note to you to kind of show you just what Dragon NaturallySpeaking can do. I say show you because I’m writing this letter with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to write with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10, but it does take a little practice in order to start thinking quickly and thinking out loud with your voice. That the nice thing about it is that you don’t have to stare at your computer screen for long hours anymore.

Typically when we type with our hands, we tend to look at the computer that were typing on. To be more specific we tend to look at the computer screen, and this wears out our eyes and makes us physically tired. The muscles in our eyes absorb all that light from the screen, and the longer we stare at that light the more tired our body becomes. This can even lead to headaches or migraines or just fatigue in general.

So the cool thing about Dragon NaturallySpeaking is that you can look around the room, look around where ever you happen to be, and taken some sights and smells in that you normally wouldn’t have the luxury of doing with your eyes glued to your screen. This really does help to keep your brain moving, and it helps get you thinking outside the box and focused on those things that you need to be focused on.

If you are the type of person that uses a white board quite a bit, you can even stand up and start brainstorming on a whiteboard, while you are simultaneously dictating the thoughts that come to you onto your computer. Now that’s not necessarily the most effective way to capture information off of a whiteboard, but if you need the information copied into text form, it can be very useful and I’m simply trying to illustrate a point.

There are many ways that you can use this particular program to save you a great deal of time, to further illustrate that point, I have written this entire note so far in under three minutes flat! That’s a little over 175 words per minute, and this is actually the fastest ever time that I have recorded with Dragon NaturallySpeaking. When I used version 9, I had clocked the program running at about 167 words per minute, and so with Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 and a brand-new laptop, I have just set a new personal record.

That doesn’t include editing time which I will go back and do now, but it’s still amazing to be a laugh your words and thoughts captured so quickly by your computer.

Sincerely,
Brett Bumeter

http://softduit.com

PS Even with 3 minutes of editing thrown in (which included writing the salutation and a few more lines) this article still only took 6 minutes to write, and that averages out to about 92 words per minute!

Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Discount Coupon Code Details. Use this coupon code to get 25% off either Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Preferred or Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Basic. You can even get 10% of Macspeech Dicate with the same code and link combination.
DNSMSBG
The code only works when you click on one of the links in this article or the clickable image in this article! The discount enables you to save $25 – $50 off the price.

This software is a godsend for people with disabilities, people who type a lot, (people who talk a lot, lol), and more. I think it would make a very good gift.

New York Traveler Blog Migration

I have two travel blogs. One is a blogspot blog, called New York Traveler. I started it up almost two years ago, to use a personal journal and as an entertaining travelogue for readers who love to read about travel experiences as much as I. I have been surprised at its success, for something that started out as a little personal journal. Perhaps this is the very reason why it has become successful, because people hunger for that personal touch, whether it be about travel or cooking or family life.

I was unprepared for the success of New York Traveler. I didn’t know much about web design or website-building then. Honestly, I am still puzzled about SEO and A-Lists and other marketing. I guess my ignorance is self-inflicted; I’ve stated before that I’m just a writer, and I love to visit new places and learn history. Marketing, sales, promotion, etc just aren’t my cup of tea. I’d love to make a living doing what I love to do (who wouldn’t?), so I’ve been very open to promotion and advertising on my blog. It would be wonderful if I could fund my own travels (and car expenses) from my own blog. Perhaps this is where I’m going!

In hopes of such advancement, I started up this blog, New York Traveler.net, on my own domain. It’s been another learning experience for me, hosting my own blog! But as I add more content, the visitors flock in to read it.

I’m not happy sharing travel content between two travel blogs. I keep up the blogspot blog because it’s very well-established, has been bringing in some income from advertisers, and a lot of people link to me there. I’d hate to pull out that blog and leave all these empty links. I’d never do it.

However, I desire to build up this blog– which is my very own– more. If you have been a reader of the New York Traveler blogs, you’ve noticed that I post all my new travel content here. I do continue to build the blogspot blog, but my focus is changing. I think I am going to develop my own blog more.

I am going to be slowly migrating my main travel content from the old blogspot blog over to this one. This will centralize the New York Traveler and bring organization to content here. I will never delete the New York Traveler blogspot blog, have no fear. I will continue to update it with family and travel issues about New York State. But I am changing my focus– I will use the New York Traveler blogspot blog to supplement my travel posts that I will be posting here on this blog.

I am also pleased to announce that I will be soon building some new features to this new blog that will serve to enrich travelers who desire to know more about New York. I can’t divulge all my secrets, but I am working very hard to make New York Traveler.net THE place to be when you want to know everything about traveling in New York.

I ask my regular readers to please consider changing their bookmarks from newyorktraveler.blogspot.com to newyorktraveler.net. I also ask you to continue to support me in my new ventures! I’ll be developing areas where people can submit their advice, opinions, memories, and comments. Travel is a community effort. I’m excited about these developments and ask you to please be patient while I undergo some construction!

Thanks for reading and thanks for making New York Traveler so much fun to create!

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