Yesterday we launched our new city pages.

We’ve had city pages as collections of information and tips for Dopplr users for over a year, and now we’re made those pages public to the internet: the first stage in creating what we’re calling a “Social Atlas” internally.

A few weeks ago we mailed everyone who had contributed a tip to Dopplr and asked if they would prefer to keep what they had posted private to only Dopplr members, and we’re happy to say no-one chose to – so the collective intelligence of Dopplr is available to everyone on the web to help them travel smarter.

Of course, this works both ways, and we hope of course that more people find Dopplr this way and choose to participate to make our social atlas more comprehensive.

Here’s an example of our new public tips pages: tips tagged “breakfast” in San Francisco:

From which I can find a hidden gem like the one Yoz suggests:

So that’s the useful stuff, but perhaps the most noticeable, eyecatching thing about the new pages is the inclusion of Creative-Commons-licenced photography of the world’s cities powered by Flickr.

We’ve curated a small collection of CC-attribution-sharealike licenced photos from Flickr Places, and then superimposed a graph of Dopplr traveller activity, added some interesting factoids like where most people travel to and from that city and hey presto!

We’re pleased as punch with them, and especially happy to be able to support the Creative Commons in a small way. Many thanks to our friends there and at Flickr for their assistance in putting this together.

It was fascinating to work through thousands of amazing images to select them for the city pages. We created a small tool internally to help speed up this task, which we’ll write a separate more technical post about later.

We’re far from having an image for everywhere on Earth, but we’ll be adding more every week.

One other interesting side-effect of creating the public city pages was that we had to make public pages for the whole geographical hierarchy of our ’social atlas’.

So, we now have ‘place’ pages for countries and all of the USA’s states.

And, I find these pages fascinating! I’ve not been able to stop clicking around them in the same way that I could pore over an atlas when I was a child. You keep turning up things like this:

And my favourite:

I think Funafuti might be my new favourite place…

What’s yours? Go explore!

Yesterday I asked what a particular list of English words had in common. Here’s the answer:

Mobile, AL, United States | Page, ND, United States | Nice, France | For, Norway | Name, Mozambique | Union, Philippines | Best, Netherlands | Dollar, United Kingdom | Tours, France | Split, Croatia | Accident, MD, United States | Mile, Tanzania | List, Germany | Central, SC, United States | Deal, NJ, United States | Deposit, NY, United States | Trip, Romania | This, France | Back, United Kingdom | Carry, Haiti | Center, MO, United States | Start, Russia | Kilo, Finland | Purchase, NY, United States | Transfer, PA, United States | Goès, France | Plan, Spain | Media, PA, United States | Sale, Australia | Downtown, PA, United States | Fully, Switzerland | Luck, WI, United States | Normal, IL, United States | Comfort, TX, United States | Call, MO, United States | Local, MO, United States

Every one of these words occurs often in emails sent by the travel industry. And every word is also the name of a place somewhere in the world. Congratulations to commenter Smyles yesterday for guessing most of the connection.

The reason these words are important to us is that they are the “stop” list we use to filter emails before trying to interpret trip information from them. Without this list, we’d see a phrase like “accident insurance” or “for your comfort” and offer you trips to the towns of Accident, For or Comfort.

As we’ve mentioned before, the Dopplr website assigns a distinct colour to every city in our database. This is all very well, but sometimes it generates a colour that’s a little hard to see against a white background (Stockholm’s colour, for instance, is extremely pale), and I wanted to fix this.

Luckily, the W3C have a draft technique for measuring the contrast between two colours, so now when we generate the city colour we first check it to make sure that it’ll be sufficiently visible against our white background. If it’s not, we darken the colour until the contrast is high enough. This means that we’ll be changing the colours of some cities, but the new city colours will be the same as the old colours, only darker.

Heathrow’s one-bag carry-on restriction has been lifted, thank heavens. Now you can carry on your roller bag plus your computer case or other small bag separately.

Also, you no longer have to remove the computer from the bag. Seems that Heathrow has new gear that inspects it inside the case.

Anyway, small progress at an airport that has had its share of traveller woes…

NY Times: Blessed Silence Is the Newest Amenity. Hotels have tried to one-up one another with everything from custom-branded mattresses to aromatherapy candles to feather-soft sheets to help guests sleep — everything short of dispensing Ambien in the minibar. So why not sound-proof hotels? Spotting an untapped marketing opportunity, hotels are increasingly installing double-paned windows, noise-deadening door gaskets, thicker walls and even listening to heating and cooling systems to find the quietest model.

I’d definitely seek out places like this.

AP: Singapore Airlines’ A380 takes off. A Singapore Airlines Airbus A380 took off on a historic journey Thursday—the first commercial flight by the world’s largest jetliner, which boasts luxurious suites enclosed by sliding doors, double beds, a bar and the quietest interior of any plane.

Call me old-fashioned, but I’m not looking forward to flying on airplanes that take an hour to board and unload — and then stand waiting for luggage along with 600 other passengers.

Unless someone buys me one of those first-class seats, I mean suites, of course…

This sign in the bathroom of the Hoxton Hotel in London is just one of the refreshing things about the place. It tells the truth about a common hotel practice, and does so with good humor.

Quote: “Hotels ask you to re-user your towels ‘to save the environment’ (their money more like)…”

Hoxton is rapidly becoming a business traveler favorite in London, and it’s not hard to see why.

Conde Nast Traveler’s Wendy Perrin Report has a batch of great travel tips from readers this month. Sample:

Before zipping up your packed suitcase at home, photograph the inside with your digital camera. When you claim your luggage at your destination’s baggage carousel, open the suitcase and compare what you see with the image. If you don’t discover that something is missing until you get to your hotel, you will have no recourse with the airline.

Lots more where that came from…

Just left St. Petersburg, Russia, after about 10 days in the country (first time there).

We had two meals of note in St. Petersburg, one of them so good that I wanted to mention the restaurant. It’s famous in the city, but this visit was the first I’d heard of it.

Palkin isn’t perfect, but it’s as good as anything I’ve tried in a long time. The food is excellent, and the service phenomenal. Sure, it’s a bit pricey, but not excessively so for such a meal. (We once spent almost three times as much on a meal for two in Paris at a Michelin 3-star restaurant — something to do maybe once in a lifetime. Who can afford more? Not us.)

Actually, let me mention another place. It was less brilliant but still suffused with character. It’s called 1913, and serves solid Russian cuisine including what’s supposed to be the best borscht in town. It’s uneven — a piece of beef was overcooked — but the violin-guitar duo in the corner added enough extra atmosphere to make up for this.

My Dopplr friends know that I am in Ekaterinburg, Russia, a city in the Urals region. My hotel is superb in almost every way, but frequent global travellers will recognize the one serious flaw.

The rooms have Wi-Fi access, but it is outrageously expensive — about US $40 for six hours. At least this is not six hours from the time of first sign-on, but rather for a total of that time logged into the system.

Fortunately, and this is something I often find in such situations, there is a well-equipped business office where I’ve plugged my computer into the hotel’s network. Here I’m getting access at (still not sure yet) either at no cost or a fraction of the in-room charge.

Net access charges abroad are almost as annoying as the ridiculous mobile phone roaming charges. But for those of us who travel for business, the alternative is to be out of touch. Which is no alternative at all.