Lonely Planet Photo Contest
Lonely Planet Guides and photo-sharing site Pikeo have announced a travel photo contest. Have your travels taken you to London, Paris, Barcelona, or Istanbul? Did you take a stunning photo of the city? Submit it! Four winners will have their images featured on the covers of upcoming Lonely Planet’s new ‘Encounter’ guides for each locale.

And as they say on game shows, that’s not all. Winners will also be jetting off to India, Russia, Morocco, or Kenya. Runners-up and commended entries will also receive prizes.  The Lonely Planet Photo Contest is open to residents of UK, France, Spain, USA and Canada. For details see http://lonelyplanet.pikeo.com.

Change of Address
Erica at blissfultravel.wordpress.com has moved to travelblissful.com. One of the great travel sites on the web, she now enjoys her own, stunning domain. Stop by her new digs and read what’s ahead for the revamped site.

SEO Tips
RT Cunningham, an ex-Marine in the Philippines, has written a great 7-Part series on Search Engine Opimization (SEO) for your blog. Need the skinny on SEO, SERPS, building backlinks, and generating more traffic? Need SEO Tips that work? Read RT’s UV SEO Series to get the 411.

It’s Friday morning in the Middle Kingdom. I’m off to Hong Kong to pick up my new axe.

I’ll be staying in palatial cheap basic accommodations. My last trip to HK saw me staying at the YMCA. I don’t know what reputation The Y has in other parts of the world, but in HK it’s bomb diggity.

I’ve found some cool new blogs this week (well, new to me) and wanted to share. Give these folks a read, they have something interesting to say.

I mentioned Christine at almostfearless.com earlier in the week. She has a great post about how to receive your mail, in a virtual sense, while overseas.

Julie at Collazo Projects has an interesting piece on flubbed journalistic endeavors and gives her commentary on the Ann Curry/Ingrid Betancourt interview.

Want to do cool, free stuff in Boston? World-traveler extraordinaire Nomadic Matt has the answers in a recent post.

Theresa and Jeff of Livesofwander.com are leaving for a year of world travel. They have some interesting posts and neat things to say. Their site offers readers a chance to vote on where the couple should go on their epic adventure.

Signing off for the weekend. Stay chilly, I’ll try to stay dry.

Image courtesy of the BBC

Quite some time ago I made a comment regarding a popular blog and the degradation of culture - leading to the end of the world. No, I don’t remember who’s blog it was on. One of the Usual Suspects, most likely.

Time Magazine agrees with me. It’s good to know I am still at the forefront of original and ingenious thought.

With thanks to the LFC.

My days of pimping products and crap for PPP and other ridiculous web outfits are over. Yeah, I’ll miss the easy cash but I do have morals. Bearing the previous statements in mind, I’ll admit the rest of this post is a giant advertisement.

Why, Sti Fu? Why? Because: This is something I use, happily. I want you, all of you, to get a blog host.

To My Fellow Bloggers: Are your words and images that unimportant they only deserve sub-domain status? Do you really want your URL to be http://hotchick.wordpress.com? No, you need a good blog host. Read the full story

RT Cunningham at Untwisted Vortex, uncrowned prince of the blogosphere, has been as busy as a beaver as of late.

Last week he posted some great articles on improving your blog.

Want to know how to use Feedburner to offer RSS updates by email? RT is the man to see. Check out info on the Top of the Blogs, a new ranking service . Heard about Stumpedia? It is a new human-powered search engine. RT has been there and lived to tell the tale.

RT is a knowledgeable guy that I met through Carrie at My Several Worlds. The man knows blogging and WordPress. Give him a click and learn a lot.

Yes, WordPress, the preeminent blogging software, has taken a giant leap forward with the release of version 2.5. This is a must for those of you with a self-hosted WordPress blog. The new dashboard and interface are clean and less confusing. I’m still playing with it, but my first impression is that this is a great upgrade. I suggest you read the notes on the WordPress blog. A couple of new features are listed below.

User Features

Cleaner, faster, less cluttered dashboard — we’ve worked hard to take your feedback about what’s most important in the dashboard and organize things to allow you to focus on what’s important — your blog — and get out of your way. In collaboration with Happy Cog and the community we’ve taken the first major step forward in the WordPress interface since version 1.5.

Dashboard Widgets — the dashboard home page is now a series of widgets, including ones to show you fun stats about your posting, latest comments, people linking to you, new and popular plugins, and of course WordPress news. You can customize any of the dashboard widgets to show, for example, news from your local paper instead of WP news. Plugins can also hook in, for example the WordPress.com stats widget adds a handy double-wide stats box.

Check out the videos: Major coolness.

dashboard-and-images.swf

dashboard-and-images.avi