I came across this tight bit of travel genius on Condé Nast, the official publication for the Association of the Voyage Impaired:

Made for Spain has booked a car for you in Barcelona’s Sants Station—and supplied instructions on how to retrieve it. It’s a 90-minute drive north to Girona, the capital of the province of Girona, near the French border, so leave the hotel by 10 a.m. Park in the train lot, where you’ll meet your guide.

Maybe that doesn’t seem terribly wrong to people who don’t know Catalonia, but read it again and keep in mind that this is for a person staying at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel on Passeig de Gràcia. You’re picking up a rental car at a train station to then drive it to a train station. If that doesn’t seem odd because you’re thinking, “well okay, but it’s so much faster to drive!” then let me emphasis that the “90-minute drive” is complete and utter horseshit.

Getting from Barcelona Sants out to the highway takes a good 20 minutes without traffic. Leaving in the morning means that there will be traffic. Getting in to the center of Girona is a) slower than getting out of the center of Barcelona and b) not easy as Girona is probably the most difficult town to drive in, in all of Catalonia. Also, to make this time, you have to take the toll road as the non toll road takes a good hour longer.

Let’s get back to the train station to train station by car thing. You see, from Barcelona Sants to Girona, there’s the very nice, direct Media Distancia train. It takes one hour 15 minutes and costs just a bit under 10€. Oh yeah, you can take it at the Passeig de Gràcia station instead of taking the Metro or a taxi to Sants because the Mandarin Hotel is right on top of Passeig de Gràcia!

So, here’s the suggestion by “travel specialist” Virginia Irurita at Made for Spain to go from Barcelona to Girona: 100€ (50€ for the car, 20€ in tolls, 30€ in gas) minimum in travel expenses plus 3-5 hours in round trip travel plus the stress of driving in a very foreign setting. And here’s the suggestion by anyone with the smallest fleck of common sense: 20€ round trip train (15€ if you want to save more and take a slower Regional train) plus two hours 20 minutes in total train time, up and back, plus getting to chill the fuck out while riding the very comfortable trains that Renfe has.

So, brav-o Condé Nast and Ms. Irurita for guiding travelers to Catalonia in such a “special” fashion. I’m sure their credit card providers salute you.

It’s generally a moment of “ah fuck” whenever I see a spike in stats on this little rag. Inevitably, it will always be to an old post which means people look at it and then leave, jacking up my bandwidth usage with my hosting provider, but little else as I don’t run ads nor do I get paid to write on this, my personal website. Historically, these spikes came from forums which where the bane of the internet before Tumblr. Now, they apparently come from those who choose to “make use” of your content without really telling you about it.

The article in question was a link posted in the comments section of a bloggish site in San Francisco. I had written for it in the past, but stopped as a) it paid little b) was declining in quality content c) I was moving out of San Francisco and most importantly d) they started turning down my pitches to then assign them to other authors which was weird as they generally seemed happy with my work. I should emphasize that I’m not alone in this and their way of doing business in San Francisco scratches the head given that it’s a dinky town and word gets around.

I could leave that in the past as their idea of being a decent entity does not overlap with my own but, given that one of the editors follows this blog, I apparently now have someone lurking, ready to snap up any potential article I write, re-work it very little, and then publish it as their own. That, is disturbing.

It’s like going on holiday and having at the back of your mind that someone is rummaging through your suitcase the minute you check it in for a flight. It makes me not want to write anything original here and it’s a large part of the reason why I write so infrequently now whereas years ago, I wrote nearly every day. It’s a greater problem than the “link economy” being bankrupt as there is so much digital clutter now, most people/companies will try to emphatically put out content as their own regardless of whether it’s true or not just to try and establish a brand.

Ultimately, no matter what they say, the days of this outfit in question are numbered for many reasons I don’t feel like getting in to. But the bigger issue is that I like writing a lot and while I publish travel guides (from completely original research), I don’t make oodles of money doing it.

Much like gardening for some people, I keep at it, solely for the pleasure of writing and creating new content for myself and hopefully others to enjoy. But this issue is one that’s been bothering both myself and every other writer I know for some time. I have no solution to it other than writing less which honestly, does not balance out the equation.

I have a nice little Twitter account for Vinologue which serves its purposes well to broadcast Vinologue news and engage with the online wine community. According to Klout, you probably wouldn’t think so though given that it has a 31 rating or so. This is out of a possible 100, so yes Vinologue’s Twitter is ass according to Klout. Those who score higher are guys like this Melvin who I briefly followed but then had to stop as the amount of echoing of links was just too much to handle.

Then of course there’s the Klout rating above for Maneno. Yeah, the score is really low of 11, but the account is seen as a “top influencer” for Africa (this continent of a billion people in case you didn’t know). Yes, the account has nearly 5,000 followers, but here’s something important to note: it hasn’t posted a single tweet in two years. And so this, is “influential”?

What I’m basically getting at is that these metrics are crap. They’re analysis of raw numbers. Yeah, yeah, I’m sure the Klouters would rally around some press release to the effect of “we have an algorithm that charts yadda with yedda and cross checks it with yodda to give you a true rating of influence”. Life doesn’t work like this. Klout only gives rank based on those who get retweeted heavily or have a lot of followers. Sure, other things are taken in to consideration, but if you’re going to rely on this system to tell you who is an important Twitter user, you’re doomed and should just pay Kim or the Dogg to tweet up your shitz.

So, you’re living in San Francisco. Congratulations! I don’t anymore, but when I did I was one of the writers for The Tender, the Tenderloin’s #1 News Source™. It was both rewarding and frustrating as hell at the same time. I didn’t get paid to write it but it did become popular and was a worthwhile experience. I’d suggest that you write your own local blog, but if you do, there are things to take in to consideration.

First, you need to focus. I don’t mean just geographically, but also topically. Humor is more popular with San Franciscans that serious. Also, hedonism. Writing about food and drink will always get eyeballs. Writing about the Mission will get you eyeballs as the Mission loves talking about the Mission, but it’s a crowded room at this point. Also, toss in a random article about neighborhoods and microhoods. San Franciscans prematurely ejaculate when they get the chance to debate hood politics.

But, even if you can write at the level of a Nobel laureate, if you don’t get links from other sites, no one is probably going to see it. This is of course a double edged sword as in the beginning it will be great but then you’ll realize that how these sites stay in business is to scrape your content and if you have enough of your own momentum and reader base, it will get annoying as you won’t be getting paid (see below).

The Linkers

SFist gets oodles of traffic and they do link roundups daily. The key is to either have an article that is odd (“Naked yoga guy punched in nuts by Willie Brown!”) or a scoop that is immediately topical which will most likely have something to do with SF city government or something about gay life (“Olague bitch slaps Kim at BoS meeting. Weiner: I like to watch”). Of course, until you get on their radar (ie they follow your feed) you’ll need to nudge them with a tip about the article. Keep in mind that Brock, Andrew, Leanne, and Jay are nudged all the time and so you might get ignored in the beginning. Don’t take it personally, just keep at it in a friendly manner.

Laughing Squid also has pornstar amounts of traffic loads. Probably a bit harder to get up on there as they don’t do roundups like SFist, but if you breach their perimeter spam tip defense and get a listing, the masses will arrive. As to the best content to toss at them, again, unique SF things, similar to what you’d send to SFist, although if it’s a bit artsy and creative in nature, they will probably like it better.

SFgate gets no end of traffic, but they will never link off to anything you write. Hell, they can barely even afford to spellcheck articles before they go up. Your best bet there is to create an account or two to comment with and leave a link to your articles in the comments section when they’re related. They have really weird policies though and might delete the link, but it’s fucking scary how much traffic it will toss your way. Scarier still is that they somehow stay in business. One spot that will get your decent traffic though is Inside Scoop if what you have is food-related and my interactions with Paolo were always positive.

Eater SF is where you want your food and drink links to appear. Carolyn is insanely hungry for links and content scraping so if it’s the least bit new, she’ll put it up in a round up or even make a small “article” out of it. One horribly annoying thing is that you’ll always see your content phrased in a form like “As Eater has been following…” or “Based on tips to Eater” in order for them to somewhat “own” your content. Again, in the beginning traffic from Eater can be helpful, but as time goes on, it’s more of a burden than anything else.

Curbed SF is similar to Eater in style and if you write anything related to property news (“Old Victorian burns down”, “Hippie crack den to be torn down for mixed use apartment building”) you can send it there. Curbed has a similar model as Eater as they’re both part of the same company. The downside with Curbed is that it’s very easy for the editor Sally to blacklist you. You’ll never know why and honestly, once you’ve got your own consistent reader base, it’s a blessing in disguise.

Grub Street San Francisco is similar to Eater. You won’t get as many clickthrus though which is unfortunate as I quite like Grub Street. If you email the editor Jay (yeah, same Jay as at SFist) about a new article, he’s a pretty fair dude in how he puts stuff up and cites the source. Again, it’s gotta be food and drink related.

Muni Diaries are the good people of Eugenia and Jeff. If you have an article that’s Muni-related, send them a tip. They’ll likely post it and without any bullshit or drama.

Uptown Almanac is there for when you have something really offbeat. Kevin is a funny dude and he likes funny, rough shit. If you send him a tip about a new ice cream pop up in Hayes Valley, he will probably tell you to fuck off, as would I. Or, you might luck out and he’ll write an article calling you a dumbass.

SF Weekly has a couple of thriving blog sections. Send them tips about your articles and you’ll probably get picked up in round ups, especially for Foodie.

Leave no trace

The sites above are all decent to get links. Not decent are ones like 7×7 which seems to be completely run by blonde intern girls from the Marina. How that piece of shit “publication” is still around blows my mind. Try and stay off their radar as at best, they will see one of your articles, maybe like it, and then write up their own article without citing you as the original source. That’s the way they roll. Also sucky are the likes of San Francisco magazine, SF Appeal (“It’s not a blog, it’s a news source!”), and Tablehopper. Don’t bother with them as they’ve got their own deal going on which won’t help you in the least.

Connectshuns

You can find other like-minded SF blogger folks at Huffington Posts’s list but that’s a little of out date. Kevin at Uptown Almanac tries to round up all the local bloggers for a super secret, super sexy happy hour every now and again, so contact him and let him know how much oral sex you’d love to give him to be invited. He might let you in.

Also, make sure to start up a Twitter account and Facebook page for your blog for branding purposes as well as to publicly deride anyone who rips off your articles or calls you an asshole. After all, everyone knows there’s nothing better than to witness a flame war on Twitter…

Money, money, money

You will not be making any; money that is. No matter how well you write, how fresh your content, and how sexy you might be, you will not make any money from a local blog in San Francisco. You pretty much do it for your own enjoyment, which is something that has its ups and downs.

If you want, from the start put up some Google AdSense on your site in a non-annoying manner. That will probably rake in $15 a year. Don’t bother with sponsored articles as these will be met with scorn and people thinking you’ve sold out despite the fact you don’t get paid to blog. Also, trying to work with local businesses to advertise on your local blog is a lost cause. They’re much happier paying Chronicle ad rates with no way to measure success.

In truth, if you want to look at it this way, it can be something of a resume piece. I got a few paid articles from putting in time at The Tender. The other main writer and one that was short term also got some paid work. But, from the blog directly, you won’t earn a damned thing, so go in to it realizing that and maintain that attitude as it will help when your first “who the fuck to you think you are?” comment from a troll comes rolling in.

Otherwise, good luck. San Francisco needs a new batch of bloggers as a lot of us from the “old guard” have moved on and if people have to depend on “traditional media” for news in that town, then things are gonna get pretty unfresh pretty quick.

It’s been nearly a year since I deleted my LinkedIn profile and well, I’m still here. Nothing changed in my life or my employment once ridding myself of that social network, beyond having one less social network looming out there.

At the time, I made the case that LinkedIn was useless to me (a burden even) but that Facebook held some worth, if not for the “valuable” ability to stalk people I’d just met once, then for integrating in to websites for clients and to test Facebook-y things. I’ve come full circle on this as #1 Fan (the vanguard in my life for all things informational on the internet) deleted her account last month and was very happy to have done so. I started thinking about it and came to the same conclusion that I would probably be better off without it.

In the proverbial nutshell, I find Facebook to be a time waster that has little added value, makes us all a great deal lazier, and is getting to be creepier and creepier in how they keep an eye on you and employers want to log in to your account. For most of last year, I tried to co-exist with Facebook through a variety of methods. One was to have two separate accounts: personal and professional. Then, as an avid user of Firefox, I tossed the personal one in to Explorer (which I never used except to access Facebook) and the professional one in to Chrome (which I use sometimes). To some degree this worked to limit my interaction with this half billion strong beast.

Still, I accessed my personal account 5-10 times a day depending on how bored/unproductive I was feeling. If I were to scratch my head 5-10 times a day, I’d have a nicely-itched scalp. If I went out for a 500m walk 5-10 times a day, I’d be even healthier. Suffice to say, those brief flecks of interaction provided nothing to me, but wasting time and not actually doing or making anything.

This issue of separation for the sake of creation is wonderfully written about in this New York Times article that sums up a great deal of how I feel about our information overload. And the issue of spending less time in social media to make more is put excellently in one of Hugh MacLeod’s latest articles:

My social media stra­tegy these days has only three words: “Draw more car­toons”. In other words, create more real work, ACTUAL PRODUCT (in my case, car­toons) and the social media will fall into place, but only AFTER I’ve done the thing that actually pays the bills. Get­ting all obses­sed with social media BEFORE you’ve crea­ted something of real, las­ting value is put­ting the cart before the horse. But that’s an easy mis­take to make online, I’m as guilty of that as anyone. Never again.

But beyond personal ambitions and New Year’s resolution-esque ideas, I register this as one small voice in what will hopefully be a larger protest against the channeling of the web, which must remain an open source of information and knowledge. Matt Mullenweg touched on this and despite his being seven years younger than myself, he said a quote that is very much how I feel, “I hope this is the most closed it will ever be in my lifetime.”

You see, Facebook is doing everything that it can to make Facebook be the only web you see. I refuse to be part of that. That’s not the web that I spent 16 hour days programming websites in my 20′s to be part of. Plus, it offers a single point of failure whether that be political, technical, or hell, even spiritual. This mess of sites that we need to search out, find, and actively follow are the beauty of the web we know as we seek to engage it, not have it broadcast at us until we become numb and it ineffectual.

But that’s it. Facebook is gone for me. You want to reach me, you do it here on this site, or by using that later 20th-century invention called “email”. Follow my Twitter if you like, but again, that’s a broadcast medium, but one that I currently find less creepy than Facebook. Who knows, in a year, I might be deleting it as well. Best yet would be to stop by my place and have a chat at a café, like we all used to do a mere decade and a half ago.

By the way, for those who want to delete their Facebook account, go to this link, but make sure you follow the advice in this group. I downloaded my profile archive just for the hell of it. I find it quite fitting that all my valuable information from this supposedly $100 billion company could nearly be stored on an old school 3.5″ floppy disk.

Worth, Facebook doesn’t have it.