A live video feed of Old Faithful.

[From National Park Service Unveils Old Faithful Webcam]

Now people planning their vacations over here will be able to see just how much rain we get.

The Weather Channel Interactive is offering a new mapplet for Google Maps that lets people add customizable weather layers to maps and see weather data on Google Earth. [From Rain and shine hit Google Maps and Google Earth]

Must be our hot and steamy climate which drives them to crime.

The 10 most common foreign cities in which Americans are arrested

1. Tijuana: 520
2. Guadalajara: 416
3. Nuevo Laredo: 359
4. London: 274
5. Mexico City: 208
6. Toronto: 183
7. Nassau, Bahamas: 108
8. Merida, Mexico: 99
9. Nogales, Mexico: 96
10. Hong Kong: 90

[From The 10 most common foreign cities in which Americans are arrested]

Kevin May at Travolution started a meme at the weekend asking where travel industry bloggers like to go on holiday. Top five. I’ll play.

That’ll be (stream of consciousness, you understand, so I am not sitting here all day debating it):

•  Arisaig, Scotland
• Aitutaki, Cook Islands
• St Paul, Minnesota
• Waiheke Island, New Zealand
• South Beach, Miami

The fact that several of the places which popped into my head are warm and Scotland, today, is anything but is just coincidental.

Who pulls out the Rants & Raves on the Trip Advisor front page and will they take a bung to add or remove your hotel? That was my first thought when I saw the new-look site. Maybe these highlighted quotes have been there all along but now the front page has been de-cluttered, there’s no missing them, with a big thumb up or thumb down and customer rating.

It is bad enough finding your hotel slagged off by a dissatisfied guest deep amongst the Brighton pages but to find your “severe case of bed bugs” occupying prime real estate on the home page where every casual surfer will hit it up is likely to cause apoplexy. Back to my question then: does anybody know who chooses the reviews to highlight and the address of a decent counselling service for distressed hoteliers?

Side thought: there’s something very Old Granny Antimacassar about that Trip Advisor colour scheme, all those shades of beige and green. It’s not to my personal taste but the advertisers must be delighted. See how well the Tui logo stands out against all that sleepy, soothing subtlety. Blah.

These sort of gestures are not usually for me but Timothy O’Neil-Dunne (who I last talked to in Redmond back in the last century) over at the T2 Impact blog calls for us all to back the red shirt for Myanmar protest tomorrow and I am going to turn my wardrobe upside down to find something suitable (blue would be a heck of a lot easier). Count me in.

There is a good post in Travolution about the joy of blogs and search engine optimisation. Kevin May points out that the Travel-Rants blog can currently be found in second place on a Google search for “flight search engine” without, as Kevin puts it, any special investment. It certainly underlines the SEO impact of a well-tended blog.

While not quite as stellar in its ascendancy of the rankings, the Petra Blog has also been coming along nicely. Its first SEO goal was to register on the Google radar in time for the New7Wonders competition which wound up at the weekend.

Sure enough, by last week – and after just two months since the first post – if you enter Petra and New7Wonders into Google, the Petra Blog came in at numbers five and six. Not bad, considering the world-wide attention on the New7Wonders.

Long term the goal would be to rank as well for Petra and Jordan and ultimately just for Petra. Did anybody say “Holy Grail“?

Lee Odden talks about the speed Google indexes blogs today in his post Indexed by Google in an Hour.

On the subject of Petra, I am really glad to say the doors are now open on the Petra Blog, which we have just launched on behalf of the Jordan National Tourist Office. The idea is to provide a central point of information on the ancient city, to aggregate visitor content as they publish their experiences online in words and pictures and to act as an online cheer leader for Petra in the New Seven Wonders competition.

By way of reader encouragement, we’ve also set up a competition – no purchase necessary – to win a holiday to Petra and you are all invited to join in.

It is certainly worth the little effort involved and given this is still something of a soft launch – and we could still be sitting in the mythical Google sandbox long after the competition finishes – the odds on winning look very good indeed.