Travel & Travellers: my new blog
ENThis is it! I just started a new blog. It's called Travel & Travelers and it's for my duck's website, Ouest-France.fr. I will talk about travels, of course. With, always, the desire to make you discover the world, here and elsewhere...
PRECISION - The first name of this blog for Ouest-France.fr, at its launch in April 2012, was Escapes. For reasons I don't want to detail here, I had to give it another name, during November 2012. So I changed the name here and renamed it Voyages & Voyageurs...
To tell the truth, I'm a little worried about getting into this. I'm not sure how I'm going to keep up with it, with TWO blogs.
Every evening, when I leave the office, it's the same thing: I notice, resigned, that the days are still only 24 hours long, and that it's already really late, so I'm not going to post a new article on the blog today... Blogging is a time-consuming activity and I don't have much time left when I'm done with my official work day.
But hey. My first "real" ticket is online. At last.
I give you the beginning of it below. It was inspired by an Icelandic volcano. As for the previous posts, which served as a test for the start-up phase, they may remind you of something...
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The volcano that prevents planes from flying
Eyjafjallajökull, the glacier. Eyjafjöll, the volcano. What beautiful names. Mary Poppins could have invented them. This Icelandic volcano fascinates me. He spits a cloud of ash and smoke that prevents planes from flyingin northern Europe, since this Thursday, April 15. The eruption could continue for several weeks, even months!
Obviously, I would be more upset if I had a plane to catch. But here, I am amazed. Because the phenomenon makes me perceive, with an increased acuity, how our tiny lives are all linked on this pretty little ball that serves as our planet.
Enjoy your reading!
Good luck. Your first article on the volcano is interesting. I hope there won't be too many air problems this weekend.
Bravo Corinne! You're going to blow OF.fr's stats out of the water. And like Denis, I say “Good luck”, because if for us, it's still a bit of Evasions, for you it's extra work. But when you love it, you don't count. Take a deep breath, and keep a few little bubbles in your bottle... 😉
Very nice new blog, and I really like your article on the volcano with the unpronounceable name: informative (I know, that's the point of the game...), well told and illustrated (the animation on the cloud over Europe is really impressive). But you've done it all before with Petite Bulles! 😛
In any case, hats off to you, because, yes, a blog really is a lot of work. I have one for diving, one for hiking and a third on just about anything, but they're not daily... I won't have the time or the equipment! 😐
So, for Evasion, congratulations again, and you know that there are quite a few of us following you...
Well, that damned Icelandic volcano with the unpronounceable name needs to calm down soon. I know some people who have to leave for the Philippines at the end of next week are worried... 🙁
We're getting fed up with Iceland. We've already had to put up with their singer Björk, their decision to resume whaling, their desire to join the EU so that we'd pay for the crash of their banking system, and now they've smoked us out and grounded us. Some reactions are understandable:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34mHZgP9vkc 👿
Well, it's definitely trendy to open a blog backed by a duck 😉
I wish you good luck! Because keeping a blog up to date is indeed a highly time-consuming activity, I'm not going to argue with you!!!! But this new blog, will you be able to update it at work? Is it considered a professional activity?
In any case I hope you'll keep your little bubbles that so many of us enjoy 🙂
See you soon !
@Denis: Merciiii!!! As I'm replying to you, they're announcing that the airports will be closed again until at least Tuesday morning... This weekend was downright a mess.
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@Charly: Many thanks for these encouragements. I do as you say, I breathe a big blow! But I feel that it's not going to be the pie to lead everything together ...
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@Malene: I really appreciate your encouragement. Here, on my Petites Bulles d'Ailleurs, I don't put too much pressure on myself (it's my personal blog, I publish at my own pace, when I want, when I can), but the Évasions blog is nonetheless intended for the Ouest-France website... I'm a journalist for this newspaper, so it's a “professional blog”, with professional constraints, especially for the pace of publication. But we'll see. I'll try to do at least one or two posts a week on it (if I can find the energy, after my days at work).
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@LeTrollVelu: What a pleasure to find you here again, sieur Alimata. I was beginning to miss the troll with the hair everywhere... I'm totally on board with his primordial anti-Islandism. Because I'd be just as pissed off if I had a scuba-diving trip planned here in the next few days. All kidding aside, I'm keeping my fingers crossed for you, because the Philippines is really nice...
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@Thib: Oh, my, Thib, you have a way of asking the right questions (the angry ones... 😆 ). Hum. Good. In fact, Ouest-France is developing various internet projects, including journalist blogs. This blog project has been in the works for quite some time, and it's finally been launched. We're off to a slow start, with a few motivated volunteers, including myself...
»West-France blogs
It's considered a “professional” activity, then, since we publish as Ouest-France journalists, under the Ouest-France “brand”, via hosting on the website. Ouest-France.fr. But... how can I put this... there's no way it's going to encroach on our official work days either, which are already more than a little busy... So, to tell the truth, for the time being, it's a professional activity that I'm going to do in my spare time.
Well, rest assured, there's no way I'm letting go of my personal blog!!!! These Petites Bulles d'Ailleurs bring me a lot too, through these exchanges with all of you who read me. I really enjoy it, and I can't imagine traveling or diving without sharing my discoveries!
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Well, well, well... 🙂
I also wish you good luck: I've got 4 blogs of my own (one of which is still a secret but already online, I'm fine-tuning it) + this travel blog since mid-March on Libération as you know. And believe me, it's an awful lot of work, especially when you're traveling all the time. I wish you lots of courage!...
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Say, Miss, that's class!.
When will the West-France car with driver?
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Cheer up, you'll have to get a secretary... you can post the same articles on both different blogs 🙁
Come on, great adventure and good winds!
Ciao
@A World Elsewhere: I love it when you tease, Marie-Ange!!!! A secret blog? Damn! I want to see it, I want to see it!!!! 😆
I know it's going to be a lot of work... But I just couldn't resist participating in the launch of the Ouest-France blogs!!! So, here we go! We'll see if I can keep up. And thanks for your encouragement...
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@Audrey: Thanks, miss!!! I'm still my own chauffeur (literally and figuratively). As proof, all this week I've been driving back and forth from Rennes to Fougères in a pretty royal blue car with a round red logo on it... But I've got other projects on the go that I need to tell you about (teasing, teasing).
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@Rod: There's no question of posting the same articles on both blogs. And that's where the tricky part comes in. The last thing you want is for one blog to swallow up the other! My Ouest-France blog, which is necessarily for the general public, will be more general than my Petites Bulles d'Ailleurs, which remains “my own little piece of the web”, to paraphrase another blogger I interviewed. Scuba diving and Asia, my two passions, will continue to play an important role, as my personal escapades unfold...
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It wasn't teasing on my part, but I just wanted to emphasize that when you start blogging, you never know how far it will take you! The proof is that, within a month of each other, we're both suddenly bloggers for a national daily newspaper (I admit to having dragged my feet for six months precisely because of the difficulty of addressing different readerships on the same theme)...
By the way, the funny thing is that your URL for Ouest-France is almost identical to mine at Libération:
http://evasions.blogs.ouest-france.fr/
and
http://evasion.blogs.liberation.fr/globetrotteuse/
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Thanks for your clarifications! And sorry for my annoying questions... I'm a salesman, I'm used to it! And you're allowed to say “joker” first... 😉
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@A World Elsewhere: Yes, yes, I swear... My curiosity is piqued, I'm totally “teased”!!!! 😆 (I can't wait to find out.)
As far as I'm concerned, starting a new blog under the “Ouest-France” banner is rather logical, given that I'm already a journalist with the paper... What's interesting is that my experience as a blogger, conducted on a personal basis, in complete independence, is finally finding an outlet in my “official” job.
(Note: Ouest-France is a regional daily, not a national one, which doesn't prevent it from being France's leading daily in terms of circulation, far ahead of the nationals, with almost 800,000 copies a day).
As for domain names, most web platforms use suffixes in front of theirs. For blog sections, everyone simply adds “blogs” to the URL as a sub-domain. But when I was choosing a title for my OF blog, I hadn't calculated that the section dedicated to travel at Libé was also called “Évasions”... As a result, the composition of the URL at OF was decided as follows:
http: // + nomdublog + blogs.ouest-france.fr
...so it starts the same!!! 🙄
At Libé, I see that they actually add the name/pseudo of the blog at the end, after a slash...
I mean, yes, you're totally right: between the first steps of my personal blog in 2006 and the launch of this OF blog today, I don't know where it's all going to lead me. In the end... that's what's great!!!
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@Thib: No worries. I agreed to start the experiment under these conditions. Nobody forced me to do it. I make no secret of it. I was just pointing out that the “angry” questions are often “good” questions...
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Congratulations on this new adventure Corinne!
Does this mean that your blog at Ouest France is a paid job? Or is it an extension of your salaried workload? This is often the case with major media, especially TV and radio.
I believe Libération was the first national daily to have an online version, and they currently have 40 blogs online, broadcast on the home page for each new article published. What's interesting is that in just a few years, the online version of Libé has become much more widely read than the paper version: nearly 4 million readers worldwide every month, and growing. And the same is true of all the major national dailies!
At the beginning of 2007, we read here and there: “the blogosphere as a whole generates 30 times more page views each month than the website of the leading national daily newspaper online”.
Proof that the major media are all concerned by their web version, and their interest in bloggers is thus explained, even if they are sometimes cautious, since the web calls into question the whole organization and ethics of the press professions.
Vast debate, but fascinating debate... 🙂
@Danielito: Thank you so much !!!
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@UnMondeAilleurs: Oh, there, read again a little higher the answer I already gave Thib. I'm not paid for this new blog. As you elegantly put it, it's an extension of my salaried workload...
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But I'm really looking forward to experimenting with a blog as part of my job. Compared with my usual papers (whether for the print edition or for the Ouest-France.fr web pages), this blog gives me the opportunity to write in a different, more personal style, on a “passion” theme, and in a format that's almost unheard of under the newspaper's banner. In short, I'm very, very happy with all these new features.
As for press issues on the web, I follow them very, very closely, as you can imagine!
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