Back in August 2007, we started including an ad from BlogHer to the sidebar of our blog. The point was to see if we could make a little extra money on page views without annoying the heck out of our regular visitors. (We hope we’ve been successful.) While it brings us a bit of extra money every month, it was never intended to make us rich.

I have also played around with Google Ads for our local wine tasting and events blog, although it’s a pay per click system, so the revenue varies depending on how well Google targets to ads to your visitors based on your content.

While there are plenty of posts about how to make money online (almost 40 million results for that phrase in fact), it’s safe to say that most of it is crap. However! I have been reading Ittybiz.com since early this year and I find Naomi’s insight to small business advice and marketing refreshing and helpful (as long as you can get past the occasional naughty word or two). So, Naomi is starting a new series on multiple online income streams and if you are at all interested in that sort of thing, check it out. She starts out with some good examples of why it’s important, in this economic climate, to be creative about how you earn your living.

About two years ago I created an online page that listed as many of the local wine tastings as I could find in my spare time. Two weeks ago, I went ahead and registered a domain name and designed a blog specifically dedicated to the same purpose including regular Twitter updates, wine reviews and wine news.

So if you want to see what we have been drinking lately and what it going on locally in regards to wine, visit triangleVINO.com and/or follow us on Twitter.

I’m a sucker for data, and today I saw an interesting interactive map of the US on the MSNBC news website that lets you view data such as age of population, education, wealth/poverty levels, etc by state. Even cooler, you can zoom into each state and look county by county, and even by congressional district. For example, our area, the Research Triangle between Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh, has one of the highest densities of college degrees in the country. Cool :)

We read about the website postcrossing.com a few months back but finally signed up this week. We’ve shipped off five postcards (the maximum allowed at one time) to Finland, Austria, Germany, Hawaii, and The Netherlands. Once someone receives your postcard and registers it, you become the next available address for someone else. So, the more you send, the more you receive!

Interestingly, the hardest part was finding local postcards! We don’t live in a “touristy” area so it’s been a bit of a challenge to find a representative local postcard. Luckily, the Hallmark store just down the road has a huge selection. :)

If all goes well, we will be showcasing the cards we receive from all over the world, so stay tuned!

For those of you who haven’t wasted a whole afternoon on the website, hillaryismomjeans.com, here’s your chance.

(You simply refresh the page and each time you get a new “outrageous characteristic” of Hillary Clinton. You can even submit your own!)

This one is for my dad…

(giggle.)

A recent article on the American Association of University Professors website caught my eye with details of international scholars that have been denied entry, or in some cases, re-entry, to the US. While all the cases are troubling, the cases where the government has refused to provide cause for denial are the the worst. In an atmosphere of secrecy and silence it is too easy for government officials to abuse power in an already bureaucratic process. Accountability demands a measure of openness and a system of appeal, and we need to make it easier for people to visit and conduct business, not more difficult. Continuing with the current system will only lead to continued bad publicity and animosity toward Americans traveling to other countries.

I’m not a big fan of top 10 or top 25 lists, but this one made me laugh out loud so I felt the need to share it: Traveler comments that make you say “Duh!”

Sadly, I’m sure these are all real. I especially like these two:

• Where is the best spot to watch the fireworks in London on the Fourth of July? (Come on, Yank. Just think about this for a nanosecond.)
• I am a vegetarian. Do they have vegetables in Kenya? (It is a strange thing in Africa, countries with two vowels in their names are vegetableless. It is just like some dry counties here in the United States.)

For those that don’t know, Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia that is editable by nearly anyone on the internet. It is a great resource – but, as with any information source, some skepticism must be applied.

A good reason for skepticism was published today via an AP story about wikiscan, a website that tracks the IP addresses for revisions to Wikipedia entries. Basically, the site makes it easier to find cases where a company, government agency, etc., may have edited a story in their own interest. Wired has a good list of some of the best finds – for example, one unusual edit of the Israel entry was made by a computer on Al-Jazeera’s network. Because Wikipedia is so popular these sorts of edits aren’t going to stop (people could just make changes via coffee shops or other networks for example) but it does make people aware that they can view the history of a page, especially if they are suspicious. Hopefully this will make it even less likely for these edits to remain hidden and improve the truthiness of the site.

I saw this blog post today titled, “The Disneyland Price Comparison for Park Fees” and a few of the comments got me stirred up again about a recent experience at Zion National Park.

We received a 2007 National Parks pass as a Christmas gift last year and the nice thing was that it only cost $50 (because it was purchased in 2006), instead of the $80 it would cost today after the recent price hike. In fact, we took this trip because of this gift and we plan to use it again in August when we visit Glacier National Park.

The first time we used the parks pass was in Shenandoah NP in early May and the guy simply swiped the card and we were on our way. We had no idea that procedures were more strict out west.

We arrive at the Zion NP gate and hand over the card and the woman immediately asked for an ID.

No problem.

Then she asks if this is the first time we’ve used the card.

No, we used it about two weeks ago.

Her next move is to punch the “May” month on the card, effectively expiring our card then and there.

When she handed the card back to me, I (thankfully) noticed this mistake and asked her about it, letting her know that our card was supposed to be good until the end of the calendar year.

She stared at me for a second, and left the booth to go ask someone else. When she returned she told us that because our card was now expired (thanks to her mistake), she was giving us the option of “upgrading” to the current parks pass for an extra $30.

I almost lost my mind.

And this is where Eric jumped in.

After much back and forth, including her never admitting that she screwed up and telling me that “she was in charge here and knew what she was doing,” (when she clearly didn’t) we were finally told to drive over to the parks office and they would issue us a new 2007 pass—which is the result we should have gotten in the first place. This time we had “Dec” punched out immediately to prevent further mishaps.

I get it. She didn’t read that the pass was for “2007″ and made a mistake, but at least APOLOGIZE and certainly don’t act like you are doing us a favor by allowing us to pay more for a replacement pass!

For the record, we never had another problem the entire trip, including on our way back through Zion, entering from another gate. It’s a beautiful place, it would be nice if the people at the front lines were a little more helpful and a little less bitchy.

The New Zealand Herald story “America’s war on tourists” has been making its way around travel blogs, providing a viewpoint on visiting the US from other countries. Unfortunately, I’m not surprised that we’ve been voted the “most unfriendly destination for foreign travellers.” As I’ve written before, recent US government policy seems to treat all visitors with suspicion. Quite simply, this policy is shortsighted and embarrassing and will end up hurting us economically – and not just in terms of tourism, but in science, engineering, etc.