I’m tending to post these types of links first on Twitter.

• Google Advertisers Quick to bid on “XL Airways” – with brand bidding in place, the competition are quick to the mark.
• Similar to http://woot.com but for travel deals: http://Fourtraveldeals.com – Nice idea, looks to be all Expedia (via 37s blog)
• Top 10 email clients used by business & consumer recipients – didn’t expect Hotmail to be so high on b2b
• Travel start up at Techcrunch50 (were there any others?) GoPlanit for generating itineraries
• Missed this, list of 75+ online travel resources from Mashable (2007)
• Delving into the problems with www.italia.it at http://tinyurl.com/5zngoo – dot post about the logo last year http://tinyurl.com/5p37g9
• SkyScanner site review http://tinyurl.com/6rykgr

First a bit of blog housekeeping – we’ve added our latest Tweets in the right hand column. Or you can follow us at http://twitter.com/dottourism/

There has been another round of conversation regarding the changing face of PR in recent weeks.

• Does the Thrill of the Chase Make PR Obsolete? from Steve Rubel, a high profile long time blogger and senior vice presient of Edelman Digital. He laments at the deluge of off base email pitches he receives in a changing PR landscape. He deletes 99.99% of them. I receive on average 10 a day – the vast majority are not relevant to the online area that this blog focuses on. It’s frustrating that the senders do not take the time to do a little bit more research. See also Hotel Blogs rants about PR

• Mike Arrington writes more (from a tech startup angle) on the subject at The PR Roadblock On The Road To Blissful Blogging and the 150+ comments provides views from all sides. He comments that the people writing about startups is much more varied now but the approach to engage them is wide of the mark.

• From a travel PR perspective Neil MacLean has written a guest post on the Travolution Blog. We work both with private and public sector organisations directly and with PR agencies. In our experience, only a very small minority market and carry out services that Neil rightly comments a modern PR agency should; online copywriting, web monitoring, search engine marketing, analytics and basic web development.

• An Econsultancy post this morning from Drama 2.0 Is PR broken?

• The blogosphere has been awash with iPhone 3G talk for the last few weeks. No doubt one of the most exciting things to keep an eye on will be the travel applications and GPS tie ups. To date there are 139 apps listed on the Apple site, although this should increase quite quickly as I’ve read there is a backlog of apps waiting to be cleared. Plenty of releases from the usual suspects with some suffering from poor reviews, perhaps as a result of rushing them out.

• Tim at Maastricht Hotel School is carrying out academic research on how the hospitality industry is using online marketing. As well as finding out what techniques are being used, he is trying to determine the perceived benefits of the different methods. You can complete the survey at www.rshotels.com/survey.

• As part of its regular series, E-consultancy reviewed Travel.co.uk, the recently launched package holiday comparison site. They followed up a few days later with an interview with the marketing manager. Alex at Musings also ran a detailed review ‘10 things about the travel.co.uk website‘.

Visit London are rolling out a new identity.

The new logo (’Visit London’ and the body’s website address in red type) will replace

and the Totally London brand will be no longer.

And I’m sure you’ll agree, a tad less polarising than the London 2012 logo. The official launch will coincide with the Olympic handover in August.

Oban Multilingual dropped me a line this morning about a short video they made.

They interviewed a number of overseas travellers in London to learn about their search habits. I’ve embedded the movie below.

The video focuses on the need to provide multilingual sites for international travellers.

Oban (who specialise in multilingual SEO and international SEM) are working with EyeforTravel researching online travel habits. Take part at www.faceofglobalsearch.com and win £250 of travel vouchers.

I’m going to be a tad critical on the quiz.

Oban has previewed in a blog post some of the results and indicated that so far, the three most popular sites for travel research are Google, TripAdvisor and Alibabuy. The question only presents these three sites to select from. Although there is a text field where the user can enter any site I’m not sure how often that would be used.

Perhaps a longer list or drop down of popular travel sites may lead to a more accurate cross section of preferred sites.

For the game itself I only got as far as Anchorage!