Getting there is half the fun, right? Rarely. If you are like us, you are always searching for the best deal and the best advice when you are planning your vacation. There are a tremendous amount of resources out there to help make this process a little less painful and a little more enjoyable. Social websites, blogs, and applications have proliferated over the past few years and we’ve done our fair share of testing many of them.

If you’re looking for reviews from people who have “been there,” WhereIveBeen is for you. Want to sidestep the Internet cafes and use your mobile phone or laptop, the Wi-Fi Finder is the must have app. Wondering if you chose the best seat on that transatlantic flight? Seatguru.com is for you. In search of exclusive hotel deals, don’t forget to visit the Hotels.com Facebook page. Running through the streets of Rome and need a bathroom, SitOrSquat will be your best friend. Having a little staycation, don’t forget about your daily steals on GroupOn and LivingSocial. Whether you’re headed out on the open road, hopping on a plane or spending a little quality time with the family poolside, let Fanscape help you make the most out of your vacation time with 10 more of our favorite travel apps and resources.

TripIt (Free: Android / Blackberry / iPhone / Online)

TripIt makes order out of the paper trail (virtual or otherwise) that has been created by planning a trip. It is a hub for all of your travel plans to reside – from flights to room reservations to rentals. After you’ve created a free account, simply email your confirmations to plans@tripit.com and TripIt processes the information and creates a master itinerary for you. The service also connects you with local weather, directions and city guides to help you make the most of your vacation or business travel time. This information can also be shared with your friends, family and associates. The “Pro” version offers travel alerts, frequent flyer mile tracking and exclusive travel benefits. And at $49 per year the Pro version could be a life saver for the well-traveled business person.  USA Today’s AutoPilot (iPhone.iTouch only), is a very similar service, but is designed to sync up with TripIt.

Yelp (Free: Blackberry / iPhone / Online)

True, Yelp has been around for a while now, but there’s hardly ever a time where this doesn’t come in handy when trying to figure out where to eat – at home or away. If your taste buds feel adventurous you can always try UrbanSpoon, but Yelp and its more than 11 million user-generated reviews can help you find the perfect restaurant, event or special offer. Businesses can set up accounts, but it is the users who provide the reviews in an unfiltered and unbiased manner – allowing for us to pick places based on real-life experiences.

Around Me (Free: iPhone only)

If you like to go where the day takes you, or even looking for the nearest gas station, try Around Me. It let’s a traveler or even a local quickly find information and businesses based upon your location. For every listing you can see the location on a map or view from where you are.

Travel Channel GO (Free: iPhone only – coming soon to Android and Blackberry)

The Travel Channel’s GPS-enabled travel tool allows you to explore the world and experience a city like a local – discovering the best things to do and see. Discover nearby places that were featured on the Travel Channel and get tips from trusted Travel Channel hosts. You can also share travel hot spots and experiences with your friends as well as fellow travelers.

Trip Journal ($0.99 iPhone / Android)

This is one cool app. Google Earth integration allows for friends and family to follow your routes, locations, full screen photos, video and blog entries. The app is also integrated with Facebook, Flickr, YouTube and Twitter, making this a f-u-n and highly interactive app.

VRBO.com (Online)

VRBO – Vacation Rentals By Owner – is a fantastic site to find some of the best privately owned vacation rentals, homes, condos, cabins, villas and apartments. They have a blog that’s brought to you by the VRBO bear highlighting some of the actual rental properties available. You can search for a rental and even list your own property.

CruiseCritic.com (Online)

If you are a fan of the cruise ship lifestyle, CruiseCritic.com is a must visit site. This site offers editorial content, offers and news. What’s great about this site is its member review section. The member reviews are extensive and honest – providing specific information on cruise lines, particular ships and destinations as well as ratings on different aspects of the experience such as entertainment, excursions, family and children’s options.

TripAdvisor.com

TripAdvisor is like a trusted friend – helping you plan and have the perfect trip. Hotels, flights, restaurants and rentals, the site has’em. Unsure of where you even want to go? They also offer recommendations based upon your preferences. They’ve taken to the social space with a Facebook page and Twitter account than is the perfect complement to its website – offering discussions and relevant travel news for those about to depart.

Jetsetter.com

Get yourself invited! Jetsetter is a private online community geared for the more sophisticated traveler that provides its members with great insider access to special sales to some of the world’s greatest resorts and destinations. If you’re familiar with Jetsetter’s sister site,  discounted high fashion shopping hub, Gilt Groupe, you’ll understand that once you’re invited to be a part, you’ll have access to some great merchandise at fantastic prices.

Gadling

This travel blog is part of the AOL family of blogs and is chock full of travel information and pictures. The great thing about this blog is it isn’t centered around one city or one component of travel, but rather covers just about everything – from deals to healthy road trip snacks. Interested in info on the Opryland Hotel, they have that too (psst, it’s re-opening on November 15^th).

As we mentioned at the start, there are an incredible amount of travel resources at our fingertips – all devised to help simplify our lives. The more socially plugged-in we become, the easier it gets for us to make the best travel decisions and purchases. The result is a more carefree and enjoyable experience. Just what a vacation should be.

Do I want an iPad? Yes. Do I need an iPad? No. Would I use an iPad if I had one? Probably for about a day.

Here’s why I love my iPhone. Because I can carry one device on an airplane. When you travel as much as I do, you learn to pack as light as possible. The iPhone made it so I didn’t need to carry a phone, an organizer, an iPod, and as many books & magazines as I used to. I’m all about downsizing. Less stuff.

The Kindle was intriguing. But it’s heavy. A lot heavier than you think it’s going to be when you look at it online or when you see someone holding it in their hands. I have to take my laptop on most trips so if I add a Kindle, it’s too much. But I love the concept. I love the idea that all of my books and magazines can fit on one device and I don’t have to carry the weight associated with all the individual literature. So, give me a laptop with 10 hours of life that can hold my books and magazines. Make it super light. Make it affordable. Under $1,000.

Read the rest of Larry’s post

Mashable put out a helpful How To yesterday, to make YouTube channels more aesthetically pleasing…

“YouTube recently redesigned channel pages to make them more dynamic and easier to customize. The beta channels are now a hodgepodge of your uploads, favorites, playlists, and numerous in-channel editing options. Should you upgrade to the new design, you have a greater chance of creating an eye-catching channel that’s likely to keep your viewers engaged for longer.

YouTube originally made the redesigned channels available to a select group of elite members and new users. Now however, the video site is letting anyone upgrade their channel, and eventually they’ll be moving all remaining channels over to the new version.

As previously reported, the redesign allows for wider videos and better organized pages; the result is a viewer-friendly experience centered around your content. As such, we wanted to highlight some of the best ways to maximize the redesigned channels and show you how to customize them to your liking.”

To read the full article click here.

Coca-Cola’s 100-Flavor Interactive Freestyle Soda Fountain in Action [video]

BY Zachary WilsonTue Jul 21, 2009 at 10:19 AM

Ever had one of those moments where all you wanted was a Diet Black Cherry Vanilla Coke, but all the fountain could offer you was regular old diet? Coca-Cola is doing away with that problem by introducing a new beverage dispenser. Heralded as the “fountain of the future” by Coke PR flaks, the “Freestyle”–which was first unveiled under the code name “Jet” back in April–offers more than 100 flavor options. There are traditional sodas, flavored waters, carbonated or noncarbonated beverages, energy drinks and so on. Even flavors not currently available in the United States.

The Coke Dispenser of the Future

This video is the first look at the Freestyle’s touch screen interface, which is designed by Bsquare Corporation. Select a Coca-Cola product, such as Fanta, and the screen offers several flavor options. Choose the one you want (Grape, please!) and the machine mixes the drink right then–it can even mix flavors in ways that are not traditionally offered.

The machine is more technologically complex than you’d imagine. The “PurePour” technology was originally developed to measure extremely precise amounts of dialysis and cancer drugs. Beyond that, RFID scanners are used to match cartridges to dispensers, and the onboard computer confirms everything is in place. Existing soda fountains use five-gallon concentrate bags and lots of backroom labor. Now all that is required is a highly concentrated 46-ounce cartridge inside a self-contained machine.

Another perk is the business data the dispenser sends back to Coke’s headquarters in Atlanta. The machines upload data about beverage consumption, peak times, and popular locations. Coke can also talk back to the machine, letting it know if a particular flavor needs to be discontinued or recalled and causing it to stop serving the drink immediately.

Freestyle machines are currently being tested in Georgia, California, and Utah. Coca-Cola has said it plans to place 60 test dispensers around the country by the end of the summer.

Sounds like a plan, huh?  Well, what if Apple decides to put out their own version of the Kindle and it’s sexier in a way that only Apple can produce?

Read this article!

MTVN Touts Shorter Web Video Ads

July 16, 2009

- Mike Shields

NEW YORK MTV Networks believes it has found a better answer for short-form online video advertising than the derided 30-second pre-roll: very short video spots (five seconds long) accompanied by corresponding but slightly delayed display ads.

The company this week disclosed the results of an elaborate study on online video advertising called Project Inform. That effort sought to find a better ad standard for the burgeoning medium, preferably one that combined brand effectiveness with user tolerance.

MTVN started with over 20 ad unit possibilities. By early 2009, it had boiled down its list of potential ad formats to three, including the classic pre-roll. Another unit was called the Lower 1/3 Product Suite, which combines five-second pre-rolls with transparent Flash ads that take over the bottom third of users’ video screens only after 10 seconds of content has streamed. The other unit was dubbed the Sideloader Product Suite, which also utilizes five-second spots and delayed animated display ads appearing at the side of the video player.

From January through April of this year, MTVN began testing the three placements on its collection of sites, including MTV.com, ComedyCentral.com and CMT.com. The test used 50 million streams of ad inventory for three different advertisers, including a movie studio, a packaged-goods provider and a grocery brand. The results indicated that while pre-rolls performed fairly well, the Lower 1/3 scored best when it came to classic metrics like unaided awareness, aided awareness and purchase intent.

Why do people like the Lower 1/3 unit?  It’s hard to say definitively, but Stirratt theorized that it has something to do with the lag between the short five-second pre-roll and the display unit, which appears 10 seconds later. Using that setup, “You already have a favorable impression of a brand, and people are really engrossed in content. And they are still able to interact if they want,” she said.

“Obviously, we need agencies and clients on board [creating original online video ads],” Stirratt said. “The win for the industry is when people start creating things for this medium instead of for other media.”

<Read the whole article here>

It’s called a Webcam Social Shopper and it brings the changing room right into your living room (or office, bedroom – wherever your computer resides).  Words can’t properly explain this, you have to watch the video demo…

View Video Demo

About Google Wave
Google Wave is a new model for communication and collaboration on the web, coming later this year.
Here’s a preview of just some of the aspects of this new tool.

What is a Wave?

A wave is equal parts conversation and document. People can communicate and work together with richly formatted text, photos, videos, maps, and more.

A wave is shared. Any participant can reply anywhere in the message, edit the content and add participants at any point in the process. Then playback lets anyone rewind the wave to see who said what and when.

A wave is live. With live transmission as you type, participants on a wave can have faster conversations, see edits and interact with extensions in real-time.

Is Second Life coming back?

I’m in a social fraternity at USC and one thing that everyone has problems with is keeping their Facebook groups, pages and events both private from non-USC students and as socially usable as possible. We use Facebook to share event dates, themes for parties, philanthropy details and invitations of all sorts…and so does every other fraternity and sorority across the nation!

So I thought — why not make my own social network that I can customize to meet my local peers’ needs? I could make a place about our Greek row that won’t get clogged with news and information from another college in another state!

…But then I pondered, “How can I make a social network?” I searched online for a few options, thinking at first that I’d have to buy an expensive domain name with a ton a bandwidth and hosting fees attached and find someone to help me with all of the advanced HTML and CSS to make it look good. I was wrong. I found several social network companies like Ning, CrowdVine, SocialGo, Elgg, and WackWall. All of which were capable of providing me with my very own free social network, but Ning gave me more of what I was looking for with a truly user-friendly and recognizable social networking platform.

The beauty of having a micro social network with Ning is they give you a plethora of easy-to-use customization tools that allow you to change your network to be as specific as you’d like. With a little bit of Photoshop skill, I made a logo, a header and some basic icon graphics, which all seamlessly integrated to my network, “The Row”. It’s also easy to keep unwanted users from spamming and abusing your network. I used the network privacy settings to require that new members must be approved (based on their name, email address and any other information you require they include when they sign up) before allowing them access to the site. Like the glory days of Facebook, when only ‘.edu’ email addresses were accepted, this keeps your network exclusive to a demographic, location, etc. that you determine to fit your network best.

To be realistic, I don’t think that my network or any micro-network created on a social networking site will ever grow to the size of Facebook or MySpace, nor do I believe that the majority of them will last as long. But I do think that everyday people can create great social communities for millions of active internet users to enjoy.

-Steve