Istanbul and the art of booking a hotel online: Nothing Zen! Part 2

After publishing part 1 of this story, I asked my friend the frequently traveling CEO, for suggestions, but alas he had no other suggestions than only Istanbul’s most expensive and luxury top hotels. So there I go with my conclusion in part 1.

My lady friend who organizes the trip for “Art en Route” came up with a travel agency that suggested following hotels:

and

Finally, however, on suggestion of the travel agent, a reservation has been made at the Celal Sultan Hotel.

We will see what will happen and I will keep you posted later this year.

Just for now I would like to conclude that at least for group travel a travel agent still seems a better bet than a DIY reservation. Especially because various hotels put only a small number of rooms available through travel portals or even through their own website, or have no possibilities to book well in advance.

25 Blogs on Architecture

I follow Architecture and Design with keen interest on the web, especially because many Dutchman have become known to stand out in the world of design and architecture.

With what I recently learned from using linkroll scripts from Deli.icio.us, I can easily reproduce a list I found via Archinet on Eikonographia of 25 “top” Blogs on architecture’.

Please note the reproduction below is in Alphabetical order, rather than on order of merit.

The list was compiled on the basis of Technorati’s incoming link ranking, the number of subscriptions via Bloglink and Google and Google images hits. As the writer comments: far from perfect, but at least a bit objective.

Anyway the Deli.icio.us ranking is again an other ranking than that of Eikonographia.

Added:

After publication of this post I Found out Eikonographia, is written by Michiel van Raaij, a Dutchman writing his thesis at our foremost Architecture University, TU Delft in Delft.

Shortcut: A City Blog about European cities

Shortcut logo

Today I discovered the nicely written Shortcut, A European City Blog with a nice lay out. It writes about 17 European cities.

It used to write about upcoming events, but nowadays in true web 2.0 style it links through to Yahoo’s Upcoming.

A pity Shortcut don’t feature The Hague.

Go enjoy yourself!

Added July 1, 2007
I changed the URL as they have moved to another provider.

Second Life's Amsterdam Sold for $ 50 K

Through Trendhunter I became aware of this. Again, as we are getting used to from US source Blogs there is the usual glee about the seediness of the city, also in Second Life, which way of writing about Amsterdam is a popular way of attracting more traffic. I think it is a very narrow minded approach of this wonderful city of us.

On the other hand the news kept haunting me. Where are all of us heading, if one considers the enormous amount of time there reportedly is involved for all those browsing around in Second Life, a complete virtual society. Also if one considers that serious companies and institutes are now all of a sudden investing large sums into their places on Second Life! Are we becoming dreamers in stead of real people?

I haven’t entered Second Life yet: Am I missing something? Am I too old fashioned?