• Top 21 email marketing information sources http://tinyurl.com/39ngzw
• Ten Hot Tips for Successful Online Travel Marketing – Part 1 http://tinyurl.com/4f6vt4 Part 2 http://tinyurl.com/3hnlqv
• Travel PPC: 10 Ways to Improve Your Campaign. http://tinyurl.com/3jjo4x
• Google adds more ads http://tinyurl.com/49vcb2
• Hotel service by iPhone or iPod Touch http://tinyurl.com/3wkuqm
• Social media supremo Chris Brogan posts ‘Tourism Bureaus and Bloggers’ http://tinyurl.com/4tsofy

• Whole Travel launches eco-friendly rating system for hotels http://tinyurl.com/3ln93e
• Online travel booking: What influences consumers? http://tinyurl.com/43abuv
• The wonderful world of multilingual SEO http://tinyurl.com/47svg3
• Just joined this Ning powered network – ‘A Tourism 2.0 Professional Networking Group’ http://tourism2point0.ning.com/
• Holidaymakers do not trust user generated content

• Good Q&As with Skyscanner CEO http://tinyurl.com/3jequd
• Long overdue – www.thetrainline.com has been redesigned (UK train ticket retailer)
• Online PR’ers – Yotify, Google alerts replacement? http://tinyurl.com/4v6de5
• Handy forum for those involved in travel related affiliate marketing http://tinyurl.com/45f782
• Good idea – New Zealand hotel puts scans of guest book online http://tinyurl.com/4p2cs2
• How to put your website on Google News – http://tinyurl.com/4yl96x
• Great example of triggered email (welcome messages or signup confirmations) from moo.com http://tinyurl.com/4wz685
• Holiday industry’s blues from Marketing Week http://tinyurl.com/4j4qfd
• Google Maps Mobile Adds Street View, Walking Directions http://tinyurl.com/4dqztn

Designers use visual cues such as colour schemes and images to help draw attention to certain parts of a web page. The more emotive these are, the more chance for positive feeling and a greater connection with the visitor.

Ask someone for memorable mascots and they may mention the late Jeeves from Ask Jeeves, before his departure and resulting search engine rebrand.

Or the annoying paperclip from Microsoft Office.  Another is the kangaroo used in the Australia logo.

Emotional engagement or eye candy?

Far too many sites and web applications lack a personality in copy and image selection. I recommend this video presentation at Vitamin to highlight the importance of copy in building a likeable web application.

Evoking positive feelings can be particularly important in web applications where they are intended to be used regularly and often at length by their audience.

Mascots aren’t going to work in all scenarios. They usually work best as animal or human-like creatures – as cute, fun creations.

We created a mascot for a Visit Britain campaign to promote a new B2B online service. The character, Mrs Pink, helped reach the audience in a friendly, innovative way and she is now used on offline material and e-newsletters.

The cute dog is a mascot we intend to use on a new site helping daytrippers find the best visitor attractions. We’d like to give name him, please send on any suggestions!

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