Does the world really need another travel site? Well, why not? If you can provide new and inventive ways to present data and navigate around a million choices then it just might work. Vayama just launched a pretty slick little travel engine. I’m always wondering when people will take other boring (but big) businesses like Shopping.com and respin the data into a much more clever package. I think Vayama could have taken this whole thing even further but it is a slick start.

I recently lost an original set of photos from a bad hard drive. Fortunately I found a way to pull originals back off flickr without having to click on each image. Tinou Bau wrote a nice little applet that did the trick for me.

Some pics of friends from a recent evening boat cruise in Seattle on July 24, 2007.

Project Honey Pot gathers statistics on Internet robots and the spammers who sometimes use them. Here’s the top 25 list of countries with the most spam servers.

Seattle needs more tech events like the one that was thrown on Capitol Hill a few days ago. The Naked Truth event was a great place to network with fellow entrepreneurs and Glenn Kelman at Redfin and Greg Gottesman at Madrona deserve a big thanks for pulling it
together.

Yes. Believe it. One of our favorite Seattle hangouts is a little wine bar called is called Bricco. Embarrassingly, we probably eat there about 2 times per week and sometimes 3. Anyway, I’m not usually one to jump on the popular wine bandwagon of the week so I’m always on the look out for something interesting. And Château Musar it. Serge Hochar, the proud producer of this wine, has battled against the odds for many years, and manages to make something unique. Chateau Musar is located in an 18th Century castle in Ghazir, just fifteen miles north of Beirut, in Lebanon. This location, in a region that for many years was ravaged by civil war,Chateau Musar placed demands on the Hochar family that most winemakers, fortunately, do not experience. The vineyards, which lie 30 miles east of Ghazir in the Bekaa Valley, were remarkably close to the frontline. Battle raged around the vines throughout the 1983 harvest, and Serge Hochar had to be smuggled in by small boat to make the wine. Similar conditions were endured in 1988 and 1989, and during the latter year both the Hochar family home and the Chateau Musar winery suffered direct hits from shelling. For a short while the wine cellars served a dual purpose, as they made excellent bomb shelters for the local people. Incredible story and even better wine.

Tricia and I are going to the Croatian and Italian coast for a few weeks. I guess it was just funny coincidence that I stumbled over this video since I always need to prepare myself for driving in Italy

Show the demo, show the problem, show an analogy and so much more. A great read if you’re ever needing to market something. This basic review is as handy for a budget YouTube ad as it is for a multi-million dollar Madison Avenue production.

Car Enthusiast is another Facebook application that lets you share the car you own as well as the one you want most. Guess what cars are most owned and most wanted on Facebook?

My morning reading ritual had unfortunately consisted of about 30 of my favorite sites launching in 30 separate tabs in Firefox. That made it slow to fire up my browser and it was just not an elegant solution. FINALLY I made the switch to my own custom home page. Any site, every site I ever wanted to follow populates my own custom NetVibes page. I don’t know why I didn’t use these kinds of Ajax home page services sooner. If your day doesn’t start with one of these…go take time out and custom make one for yourself. It is truly the dashboard to everything I now do on the net. That includes logging into my social networks, checking my stocks, checking my bookmark feeds etc. I haven’t used Pageflakes but the new Coriander release of Netvibes rocks. Really, really hard.