Footprints on the Mountainside

This is a paid review. One of the few that I found these days that give me something really interesting to talk about on my blog.

NYC Attractions

CitySights NY is a double decker sightseeing tours company in NYC.
Other than double decker bus tours the copany offers attraction
tickets, daily trips to Boston, Washington DC, and Philadelphia as well
as shopping trips to Woodbury Common Premium Outlets.

What I enjoyed about this site is the sheer number of tours on offer. You have tours for the day or night or a few hours, tours to specific locations, tours along themes, tours on double decker buses, boats, helicopters…. and even a tour of premium outlets for shopping for a day or even 4 days!!!

Just reading around on the site made me feel like a busy tourist and I found myself planning things and picking up on stuff that sounded interesting.

The links to the descriptions of sights attractions and points of interest are interesting as well. I enjoyed the informal style of writing and the immediacy of the writers experience in the words. I could imagine myself being there and enjoying myself. Temptation at its most tempting or maybe I suffer from chronic wanderlust.

If you live in NYC or are planning to go there, do try and do some of these things and let me know how you find them and of course, if I go, you’ll read about it here.

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And another one. I’m on a paid review roll. This one rocks. If you own any kind of business or service that you are trying to promote, this one is fun and useful. It is the Brand Strength Test - provided by Branding.

You have to answer 12 questions related with your brand identity and you then get scores based on how well different aspects fare. For example, see the above screen shot. Those are my results. You are also offered an hour long free consultation.

Other areas of the site relate with important aspects of improving your brand identity and promoting your business. Paid, of course.

I liked the perky feel of the site. Very well designed - obviously, these guys know how to make an impact. But a flash site…… I wanted to see what happens when I don’t have flash. I got a blankish page with some links, and a small notice (that is also there in the flash page) to click here if the page is blank. Me did it, and went to a bizarre orange and white page with the same information, which clashes horribly with the previous and following pages to the text version. Oh my eyes hurt! I wonder why that one page is sitting there in those garish colours.

On the whole, a colourful experience. I love the purple of the site, and hate the orange of the solo page (normally I like orange, but not orange and white combination immediately after purple - thank you. I liked the flash version for its perkiness and the text only version for its readibility (except that page), and the test was fun and brought my attention to aspects of my business I need to consider, even while answering the questions and the results made them even more clear.

However, I discovered nothing at all that I didn’t know in this experience, so I wonder what I will gain if I were to pay them.

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This is a social networking style site, where people can pay to learn languages. Myngle is still in beta, but I fell in love with the concept. This place connects people from all over the world and helps them learn new languages.

According to their FAQs, signing up is for free, but teachers are charged a small amount for using the platform for teaching, though they can upload their profiles for free. Different teachers set their charges and a student can pick up whatever is affordable. Sounds interesting, but one thing that I’m wondering about is the credibility of the teachers.

I mean, there are no qualifications required to be a teacher here. As long as a person can provide value….. well, that’s how learning languages is, isn’t it? So, you can actually have paid informal conversations which we traditionally call practice and do them for free in the real world. I guess that’s the price of having the right kind of person handy in the online world. However, what is there to assure us, that a teacher is as good as his charges make him seem (other than hindsight)?

There is nothing about that in their FAQs. Also, nothing that can allow for a refund if a teacher is just your average teenager trying to earn big money and you discover it too late. Or, if there is such a system in place, it is not there in their FAQs.

On the whole, an interesting concept, but a new service with an unknown paid factor, which may or not deliver. I’d say, use it for its convenience, but play it by ear. There probably will be some kind of rating or feedback system (its inevitable). Use it to figure out the people you want to learn from.

For teachers, I guess this is an excellent opportunity for some handy income sitting at home. All you need is broadband, Skype and a headset (which you also need if you’re a student)

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This is what I was talking about, when I spoke of paid blogging bringing fresh ideas to writing and adding to knowledge. Of course, this is a paid post, but I’m glad to be writing this one. Honestly, if I had thought of something like this, I’d probably have blogged about it anyway.

I discovered Masterpapers.com - Thesis Writing Tips while hunting for subjects to review on Reviewme. This was a whole new train of thought. We hear of paid articles and stuff all the time, but a service that will do your research for you for educational purposes? Its the first I have heard of this (perhaps I should have gotten educated better - or used the internet more for it). I certainly could have done with help like that.

Not that I’m incapable of writing tomes myself, but I’m info hungry. So if there is something that will gather loads of relevant info for me, nothing like it. I think the strength of this service is in research. Of course, they say that they will help you write your thesis too. In fact, there’s a page with rates for a variety of stuff they can do for you including powerpoint presentations, papers at various educational levels, and what not. Sounds like a pretty tempting source of organized information, if you’re a freak for enormous quantities of well-researched data to pull from, like me.

The husband is laughing as I show him the site. He wants to know if I’m planning to go back to school. Does he know how much research a website needs? Its like being back in school, even for subjects you know about, when you have to write about them, confirm facts before immortalizing them in your name……. sure, I could do with a research service too.

Regardless, folks, if you are still studying, hop over and see if it is any use to you. They have provided some samples and stuff to give you an idea of their work quality. I can’t say if it is good or not (even though this IS a review) simply because I have never used them, or any other service like them for comparison, but I think their site is definitely worth investigating if you need well written documents that need a good amount of research.

This is a paid review, but I have been looking at sites with cheap air ticket offers for quite some time, and I found the rates here quite interesting.

Cheapoair Top 25 Deals  is the site I am speaking about this time. On the whole, it looks like any other flight booking site. The rates are reasonable and the database works fast enough that you don’t site around twiddling your thumbs waiting for something to turn up, like it happens on so many travel booking sites. And there are handy links on top for group and corporate travel, so that you don’t have to hunt around wondering what happens in those cases. So that is a plus. Worth bookmarking for the next time you need to book tickets, though I would recommend comparing sites and deciding for yourself.

What I also liked, were the handy links to travel resources, hotel bookings, car hire and other needs related with travelling. So on the whole, it could be a one stop shop for planning your trip.

The wicked temptation in the site is the vacations they have. Well presented and tempting pictures. The problem being in chosing which of all the places ot go, so a definitely dangerous site for your wallet, if you’re susceptible to temptation.

On the minus side, this site is geared specifically for Americans, with local destinations, international travel and stuff being from that perspective. So, for the regular readers here, out of which only about 20% are Americans, this is a shift of perspective. Local means different to different people depending on their location, and it feels alien for a non-American.

I would definitely have felt more comfortable with the “Domestic” being America, so that I don’t have to figure out where exactly domestic is.

On the whole, a nice, convenient travel bookings site, with speed of use and access and a good variety of information available, even if it is nothing exceptional and seems to be meant only for Americans. I think they could reach out better to travelers from all over the world with that simple change.