GaiaPassage.com is subtitled "Marcus L Endicott's favorite tips for green travel around the world". I'm calling it a deep green, eco-centric travel guide to the whole Earth. My Gaia Passage project will be a handwritten ecotourism guide to the entire world, based on the circa 250x ccTLD. The general idea is to write a "white paper" for every country in the world, on environmental and cultural conditions, issues, and who is doing what about them, as well as examining both how they affect tourism and how tourism affects those issues. Anyone could write a lot about something, but the idea here is to provide "snapshots", or "bite sized" summaries, of only the best information and contacts. The name "Gaia Passage" originally came from my pre-Internet (mid-1980s) travel tips newsletter. The site is a work in progress; so far, I've completed the entire Western Hemisphere:
GaiaPassage.com is handwritten, but based on automated research and automated outline. Primary research is based on data mining 20 years of Green Travel archives. Secondary research is based on multiple years of Meta Guide Twitter bots archives. Significance is based on primary sources in the form of root website domains, and/or secondary sources in the form of Wikipedia entries. In other words, if there is not a root website domain name or a Wikipedia entry then it is unlikely to be included. (However, almost anything may be included in Wikipedia - if properly referenced.)
I have noticed that many websites of smaller concerns are going down, offline, apparently due to the economic downturn. However, social media such as Twitter and Facebook do present affordable alternatives to owning a root domain website, and I will take these into consideration when appropriate. (In other words, when something is really cool.) I have also noticed a lot of people using Weebly to make free websites. (Note, GaiaPassage.com currently uses the free Google Sites platform.)
In the early evolution of a website, especially large projects, it's important to first have the "containers" in place as "placeholders", which is no small task in itself. With circa 250x countries and territorial entities, that's a whole year's fulltime work for one man, revising one country per working day. This would mean initial completion by December 2013. Eventually, GaiaPassage.com entries may morph into socialbots, or conversational assistants, containing not only all the knowledge about sustainable tourism gleaned from past Green Travel archives, but also current knowledge resulting from the Meta Guide Twitter bots.
In my previous blog, 250 Conversational Twitter Bots for Travel & Tourism, I detailed my 250x Meta Guide Twitter bots, one for every country and territory in the Internet ccTLD. Basically, I've spent the past five years working on artificial intelligence and conversational agents - and tweeting about it all the while (links below). I had been using Twitter extensively as a framework; however, Twitter has become increasingly protectionistic, most dramatically illustrated by the high profile 2012 Twitter-LinkedIn divorce. The Twitter API has become a moving target, which is just too costly for me to keep playing catch up. In short, I find the "Facebook complex" of Twitter management immensely annoying, and concluded to stop contributing original content; so, my New Year's resolution was to stop tweeting manually at least for all of 2013. Further, my excellent dialog system API, VerbotsOnline.com, went out of business in 2012. Any other good dialog system API I found to replace it turned out to be much too expensive. As a result, all my conversational agents are shut down, at least for 2013. My hope is that the sector will shake out and/or advance during the year, and better or at least more affordable conversational tools will become available next year.
I spent a few weeks last month in the Australian bush on Aboriginal land with a group of old friends.Since I’ve come back to my ecological niche in the green Shire, I’ve been inspired to overhaul the “Destination Meta-Guide.com 2.0” (http://www.meta-guide.com/). It is now effectively a “daily green travel newspaper” for virtually every country on Earth. The Destination Meta-Guide.com 2.0 combines elements of both the collaborative “Web 2.0” and the semantic web or “Web 3.0”.
Besides maps and photos for every country, it contains relevant news stories based on my improved green travel taxonomy and the latest green travel news for all countries listed in the right hand sidebar.The Destination Meta-Guide.com 2.0 also contains a green-travel mini-guide for each country, consisting of up to ten of the most recent postings to the green-travel group for that country. This represents the collaborative or “Web 2.0” element - but, the green-travel group has been in existence since 1991 which not only predates the graphical web we know today, but also the concept of “Web 2.0” itself.Further, the Destination Meta-Guide.com 2.0 contains an automated selection of green travel links for each country, specially drawn from that country’s national domain. So, if you are operating in a specific country and do not have a web presence under the national top level domain, then to be listed here you should.The biggest additions lately have been four pages for every country specifically searching respectively Development Agencies, Development Banks, UN Agencies, and international NGOs for green travel topics. In particular, this application represents semantic web or “Web 3.0” technology, in that taxonomic filtering at multiple levels effectively creates semantic relationships, increasing relevancy.
These pages are highly configurable, so any suggestions you might have of what not to include or what to include will be most welcome! Feedback of any kind is encouraged, public or private.I need your help now to continue this project. I am requesting donations of any amount via paypal.com toward sponsoring my research and development. In return, I will include a link of your choice in recognition of your contribution - and have created a detailed Sponsors page for this purpose at http://www.mendicott.com/meta-guide/sponsors.asp
Over the past 10 years or so I’ve been gradually developing a taxonomy, or classification system, for “green travel”, or more accurately green or sustainable tourism, an extension of my work with globetrotting and backpacker tourism. In other words, what are the key concepts involved in responsible tourism? A two dimensional taxonomy becomes an ontology when applied in three dimensions, as relationships among the concepts emerge. Taxonomies and ontologies are useful in artificial intelligence applications, such as bots.
I’ve spent much of the past decade tinkering with and tweaking the http://meta-guide.com which emerged from the old green-travel.com site. Today this would be called a “mashup”. Lately, I seem to have hit on a particularly useful algorithm, and have in effect taught the meta-guide to tell me everything in the popular press about “green travel” happening in our world today, in a more useful format, country by country… for nearly every “country” on Earth…. In particular, it returns the latest information about climate change and global warming in relation to tourism, in addition to ecotourism and sustainable tourism developments, etc.
I recommend trying the random country feature and let me know what you think, either in the green-travel group at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/green-travel or directly to me!
Marcus Endicott http://mendicott.com
