January 2008 Archives

Our Community Editor Stuart has been busy pulling together a list of aviation oddities captured by Google Maps’ satellite imagery.

Listing various interesting sights included aircraft parts on a train heading for Boeing’s Everett factory, a mysterious downed aircraft in the Mojave Desert and what seems to be an F-117 Stealth Fighter in a swimming pool.

It’d be great to expand this list so if you have a suggestion for our collection, or if you want to talk about some of our finds, then have your say in our Google maps area on AirSpace.

There’s got to be countless examples out there. For example Max Kingsley-Jones (Flight International’s Deputy Editor) told me there’s supposed to be a crashed Boeing 707 left to rust somewhere on the banks of the River Nile. I’ve got to admit I gave up looking after a while (it is the longest river in the world after all), but let us know if you have more luck and we’ll add it to the list.

We've just deployed a new directory of training companies to the live site.

The Flight Training Directory is designed for anyone looking to find details on all types of flight tuition and training courses.

At the moment users can search for information by company name or country. The list is not exhaustive but it has been designed so that details can be added easily and what's more organisations that are listed can enhance their entry by supplying their url, logo and any other information that might be useful.

As with most things on Flightglobal, it's not a static project, but something that we intended to keep developing as user requirements become clearer.

In partnership with IAG’s Addison Schonland, we’re hosting a series of podcasts with Flight journalists on various topical subjects such as 787 flight delays and the latest advancements for in-flight entertainment.

The podcasts are free to download and can be found here …

And on the lighter side Flight International’s Deputy Editor Max Kingsley-Jones had the opportunity to interview Formula 1 star Lewis Hamilton as he flew to Belfast on a Bombardier Learjet.

So if you’d like to here what Lewis has to say about his current mode of transport as well as his thoughts on next season’s F1, then get it here …

Flightblogger has added another element to his already excellence and well read blog – a Week in Review video (produced weekly obviously).

Each week he sums up the major airliner news against a medley of topical visuals.

Although this is a new initiative it’s already been well received with comments such as:

Excellent recap! - EyeNo

you should be doing CNBC or something. - Scott

Flightblogger posts the scripts up below the videos in case visitors wish to review the content at their own pace.

As Maverick has reported, we've deployed some changes to the photos page on AirSpace and they now showcase more of the latest and most popular content being uploaded to the image galleries.

The photos section page now displays current highlights at the top of the page, followed by columns highlighting:

• The most recent pictures
• The highest rated
• The most commented
• The most viewed

These additions should highlight the great variety of photos appearing on AirSpace and also increase the value of rating and commenting on photos, as the best pictures will be emphasised on that page.

This is only the first step in improving the photos area, we also hope to soon improve the method of uploading pictures (to allow multiple pictures to be uploaded/tagged at once).

If you'd like to be involved in further development either on AirSpace and on Flightglobal then either post your thoughts here or join our User Group.

One of the recent additions to the Flightglobal blog portfolio represents a break away from our traditional blogging, i.e. focussed insight.

Our Image of the Day blog is, as the name suggests, a picture driven offering.

Fairly predictably, given the appetite for visual media in this industry, the blog is proving popular already. It’s swiftly climbed the blog rankings to become Flightglobal’s fourth most popular blog in just eight weeks.

The concept of the blog is a daily image which is striking, topical or of relevance in some way or other

It may be an image from this day 50 years ago or the latest glimpse of a development project or an image that sums up a news story particularly neatly.

So far the most popular entries have been images of a Lockheed Martin F-16 Fighting Falcon and a Boeing 787 Cockpit snap.

If you fancy being alerted when a new image gets posted each day then you can subscribe to the IotD blog via RSS.

Seeing as widgets are set to be such an important topic for Flightglobal, thought it might be useful to pull together a list of various types of widgets and some further reading ...

Recommended widgets

http://widgets.yahoo.com/search/top-rated
http://mashable.com/2007/09/06/widgets-2/

News widgets

http://eco.netvibes.com/widgets/live?category=4

http://widgets.yahoo.com/search/?q=news

Images widgets

http://bumped.org/WebApps/category/image-widgets/
http://flickrtools.blinklist.com/tag/flickr%20widgets/

Video widgets

http://newteevee.com/2007/10/16/top-five-video-widgets-to-fidget-with/

Apple widgets

http://www.applematters.com/index.php/section/comments/the-9-best-widgets/

Community widgets

http://www.e-consultancy.com/news-blog/363435/top-ten-facebook-widgets.html
http://www.boonex.com/products/ray/
http://www.rateitall.com/t-22486-community-widgets.aspx

Blog widgets

http://widgets-gadgets.com/2007/08/top-10-web-widgets-for-your-blog.html
http://technorati.com/widgets/blogwidgets

RSS widgets

http://widgets.yahoo.com/search/?q=RSS

Map widgets

http://www.visitwidget.com/feature.htm (good one for community build by nation)
http://bumped.org/WebApps/category/map-widgets/

Creating your own widget

http://www.yourminis.com/
http://grazr.com/config.html

Further widget reading:

Widget marketplaces (see WidgetBox, LabPixies and Wigipedia),

Widget blogs (see WidgetsLab and Widgetoko).

Widget conference (whole conference)

I’m always surprised to see traffic coming onto the site on Christmas Day.

It’s probably self destructive of me to say so but for me on that particular day of the year browsing websites rarely features.

Having said that traffic was less than half of a normal day but still totalled nearly 70,000 pages viewed.

Curious as to what motivates you lot to put down your new iPhone or Wii and visit Flightglobal, I took a peek at the stats for 25th December.

Top 10

Nothing really running away with it but interesting to see jobs activity so high.

Usually the trend is to see a spike of job seeker traffic shortly after the New Year when the annual disillusionment sets in. However it seems that some folk couldn’t wait that long!

The rest of the content is a mix of the more lighthearted stuff you’d expect to see up there.