Viking

What’s Goby all about anyway? On the surface, Goby is a search engine for things to do in your free time. The travel industry has invested hundreds of millions (if not billions) of dollars in helping you get a hotel room and plane ticket – but hotels and plane rides aren’t why people travel – they travel for experiences. Finding experiences is tough – the information is scattered around the web, locked away in domain-specific databases, and often with poor user experiences and bad information architecture. And we’ve all had the experience of sitting around on a Friday night trying to decide what to do over the weekend – essentially the same problem. Goby crawls the web looking for high quality sources of information about all kinds of experiences, covering both traditional travel content (tours, attractions, lodging) as well as more local-oriented things to do (like music, theater, restaurants, museums, hiking trails, surfing spots and skiing…). We then take those results and contextualize them, by geolocating the results and putting them on a map, cross-referencing photography from around the web, and converting those web pages we found into real-world objects you can make decisions about.

Under the covers, Goby is a structured data, task-centric search engine. Over the years there has been continuous interest in the tech & business communities around “what is the next Google?”. In my view there won’t be a “next Google” in search, if by that one means a market-dominating, universally applicable search engine. The future of search is task-centric information access, that supports both findability and exploration in the context of specific objectives – say, finding a new book to read, deciding what neighborhood to move to, getting your next job or deciding where to eat. The shortcoming of major search engines is that, while they can happily parse your query and give you some web pages to read, they have no idea what you are trying to accomplish – and therefore cannot adapt their experience to support your task. You can see this trend happening with Goby (search engine for your free time), and with other interesting products like Milo (product search will real-time store inventory), and the very interesting Hunch ( a general purpose recommendation/decision engine).

The other major dimension to how people consume information is through social media – tools that integrate search & social media have the opportunity to bring the engagement of social media to the findability of search. Look for more on this from Goby in the future.

The other boat on our Bahamas trip caught this incredible shot of a waterspout. We were on the other side of the island and didn’t see it, unfortunately. Or maybe that’s “fortunately we didn’t see it!”.

And, with that review of a great travel novel posted, it’s time for some travel. Off to the Bahamas for a week of viking. er, sailing.

I’m currently reading “The Greek Islands” by Lawrence Durrell. First, let’s be clear. I haven’t been to Greece, although (like many I am sure), I dream of a day when I can pilot my own sailboat into the harbor of a small Greek village washed in blue sky and white buildings. But reading Durrell, I feel like I’ve been there. The book reads hypnotically. Consider this passage. Durrell is writing about Corfu, and speculating that it is the site for The Tempest:

One of the magical things in The Tempest is the way the atmosphere of the island is experienced and conveyed by the shipwrecked souls when they come ashore. The sleep – the enormous spell of sleep which the land casts upon them. They become dreamers, and somnambulists, a prey to vision and to loves quite outside the ordinary boundaries of their narrow Milanese lives. This seductive quality, its bewitched disengagement from all concern, is something you will not be long in feeling here. The air around you becomes slowly more and more anaesthetic, more blissful, more impregnated with holy sleep. You will realize that this is exactly what happened to the conquerors who landed here – they fell asleep. The French started to build the Rue de Rivoli but fell asleep before it was finished. The British, who had almost a hundred year lease on the place, decided that it needed a seat of Government and built a most elegant one with imported Malta stone, as well as a chapter for the Ionian Parliament which they planned to create (for once, memorable and apposite architecture – is there any other British colony with buildings so fine?). But they fell asleep and the island slipped from their nerveless fingers into the freedom it had always desired. Freedom to dream.

Or:

Coming out of the dark church into the market he will be almost blinded by the light, for the sun is up; and it is now that the impact of this extraordinary phenomenon will begin to intrigue him. The nagging question, ‘In what way does Greece differ from Italy or Spain?’ will answer itself. The light! One hears the word everywhere ‘To Phos’ and can recognize its pedigree – among other derivatives is our English word ‘phosphorescent’, which summons up at once the dancing magnesium-flare quality of the sunlight blazing on a white wall; in the depths of the light there is blackness, but it is a blackness which throbs with violet – a magnetic unwearying ultra-violet throb. This confers a sort of brilliant skin of white light on material objects, linking near and far, and bathing simple objects in a sort of celestial glow-worm hue. It is the naked eyeball of God, so to speak, and it blinds one.

Durrell’s casual erudition is on display throughout, especially in his discussion of Minoan and Mycenaean history, where many of his comments about arcane corners of history come off almost as afterthoughts, rather than carefully studied history. And his portrayal of small village customs and interaction styles, while perhaps dated by now, speak to a deep well of experience.

This book, being from the late 70s, may be dated in spots. And as I said, I haven’t been there (yet!). But like the best travel writing, reading this book, I feel like I have.

Climbed mt Monadnock with the scouts this weekend. Beautiful fall day although the leaves had not turned as much as I expected. Route up was pretty crowded (2nd most climbed mountain in the world….). Cool in the morning, 5 layers on. Halfway up, went down to one layer, it got pretty warm. Then on top, back down to ~35-40 degrees and 25mph winds – back on with the layers 8).

On the way down we took the Lost Farm trail, and saw almost nobody. Got buzzed by two WartHogs A-10s, came over the summit (<500 feet?!), gave us a barrel roll. Pictures here, route below.

Photos for now (http://picasaweb.google.com/troop63philmont/Philmont), journal entries to come.

Leaving tomorrow (at 4:30am – ick!) to Philmont for 2 weeks in the backcountry!

Took a sail with my friend M- on the good ship Bella…from Hingham down to Scituate….12-15k winds, a fine sunny day, good food, good beer….all I had was my crappy cell phone camera, but… http://www.flickr.com/photos/40968444@N00/tags/scituate/ there are some shots anyway, plus a *very* rough map… http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=42.280357,-70.817184&spn=0.222514,0.462799&t=h&z=11&om=1&msid=107006297205264855906.00043657029a03cf530f2