501 Places

Disturbing wolf, Lille Zoo

Imagine coming face to face with this creature? I was calmly munching on my baguette when I turned round and caught sight of this monster lurking in the bushes. Well, I was so shocked I almost dropped my delicious snack. When you’re in France for a day trip you should be prepared for almost anything. But this? Welcome to the eerie, slightly unnerving and utterly splendid cardboard zoo of Lille.

Le Parc Zoologique de Lille is a very impressive municipal zoo and easily reached by a 15 minute walk from the city’s main square. It does have some real animals too; in fact I’ve paid to enter zoos that are considerably smaller. The red pandas at the entrance are a crowd pleaser, and the American and African sections provide a selection of alpacas, llamas, rhino, zebras and gazelle-shaped creatures (not all mixed together obviously).

Levitating lynx

But it’s the cardboard animals that caught our imagination. They are scattered around the park, sometimes occupying enclosures where you’d normally expect a living and breathing animal to be pacing around. It’s startlingly easy to follow the logic of the zoo owners. They sat down when designing a zoo and decided what animals they wanted. Maybe they even let a bunch of kids draw up the list. And then they set about acquiring those animals. Any that they couldn’t get their hands on (the polar bears must have been  out of stock), they merely created a cut out and hoped no-one would notice. A brilliant plan.

Look at the picture above for example. The lynx looks real enough, but if you look closely you’ll see the wooden sticks that betray him as a fake. And once you know about this one, you start to wonder about the zebra behind it (it’s real I can assure you).

Red panda - this time I know it's for real

Wandering around the zoo, stopping to admire the polar bears peeling in the midday sun and looking yellow with age, it did make me think: maybe this is a glimpse of the future? How many of these species will be around in 50 years? Perhaps the zoo of the future will only have cardboard cut-outs to show the curious children what tigers or sharks used to look like? Maybe they will add in CGI and sound effects to create a more ‘real’ feel to a zoo without animals? Although feeding time at the aquarium is going to be a tough one to pull off using a wooden dolphin.

Lille Zoo

Or perhaps it is the keeping of animals in captivity that will become a thing of the past as the next generation rejects such habits in favour of virtual interactions with the world’s most exotic species. Why stare at a crocodile on the other side of a fence in the zoo when you can fight one in mortal combat using just a set of goggles? If it turns out to be the future, the Lille zoo may just be remembered as a trail-blazer of its time. Cardboard koalas may yet be here to stay.

I can spend hours flicking through our picture albums from the last few years. However good our memory might be there are moments that get lost in the mist of time and that are rekindled simply by a glance at an old photo. So while I’ve never really invested in my camera gear (it probably shows to a serious photographer) I do value the chance to capture a scene or an occasion for future viewing.

I had a dig through my albums and selected a set of 10 photos that I was particuarly happy with. They are not technically perfect in any way; in some cases these pictures have captured the moment and the place exactly as I remember it (perhaps they now form that memory); in other cases (as in the eclipse or the weird clouds, they just act as a stamp to remind me years later that I really did see those very rare events.

Setting sun through hole in tree bark. Causey Arch, Durham on my very first digital camera, 1999

Kyrgyzstan mountains in evening light. Plus toilet.

Amber Fort, Jaipur - I just love how there are so many things going on here (most that I didn't notice at the time)

Mammatus clouds over St Albans - I looked out of the window at the right time

I never knew icebergs would look so blue. Lago Grey, Torres del Paine, Chile

Aurora Borealis, Kattfjord, near Tromso, northern Norway

Along the Thames from top of London Eye at sunset - probably the best view of London at the best time of day

Annular solar eclipse. Durness, NW Scotland, 2003

Krakow by night. One carefully placed full moon.

West coast of Barra, Scotland. Some of the best light I've ever seen. The colours on my photos from this day are so vivid they could have been photoshopped.

A few days ago several thousand people (me included) clicked on a random link that appeared on Twitter offering us a chance to find out our ‘Twifficiency’ – it was a pointless but ultimately harmless link, proof if it were ever needed that those on Twitter are by nature a fairly narcissistic bunch. Offer us a chance to give ourselves a pat on the back and by and large we’ll take it.

Those of us who waste spend a great deal of our time on Twitter will probably be familiar with many metrics that judge our online influence/credibility/ranking. You can measure your number of followers, number of tweets, Twitter influence, Tweet Rank etc etc. I’ve long been convinced that these are hollow and meaningless figures that tell nothing of how much value a person is bringing to their online community. Yet it’s only after talking to my friend and knower of most things social media Adam Gray that I found concrete proof of the absurdity of these statistics.

Adam set up a Twitter account (@agsocialmedia) at the start of June as an experiment. The no. 1 rule that covered all of these actions was clear: he wasn’t allowed to do ANYTHING to interact with followers. The plan was simple: he linked the account to Twitterfeed, set up Google Alerts for certain keywords and Friendfollow to build his follower numbers. He automated a series of actions which allowed him to send tweets which are both topical and unique to any followers (all of whom he followed back; and they received a nice introduction DM of course).  In other words, the entire account management was automated.

I’ve ran the stats on Adam’s account this week and learned the following:

Following 1,629

Followers 1,669

Tweets sent  1,660

Klout Score 23  “@agsocialmedia is a Conversationalist: you love to connect and always have the inside scoop. Good conversation is not just a skill, it’s an art. You might not know it, but when you are witty, your followers hang on every word.” Really?

Twitter grade: 97.5% (higher than the vast majority of genuine folk)

Tweet Value: $658 (sell it Adam!)

There are other metrics but I’m sure you get the point. To the casual observer, this account might look very much like any number of Twitter accounts we see every day. According to these and other sites this is a highly ranked and credible Twtter account.

While Adam’s experiment is a fascinating one it does leave me wondering whether I should find the results more depressing than I do. After all, now that I know this account is automated, how many others that I have followed thinking they were real, are in fact equally bogus?

And so to my main concern. How many people out there, particularly corporate managers who employ a person fully or partly to manage their social media, still judge the performance of their social media campaigns based on these ridiculous statistics? And while this post has focussed on Twitter the argument carries equally for Facebook and LinkedIn use.

There’s a management truism that states that what you choose to measure determines the outcomes you get. If companies are appraising and rewarding their social media teams based on these objective metrics, perhaps Adam’s experiment should serve as a wake-up call.

This week’s guest post is written by Juan Otero Rionda. I spent several days with Juan on my recent blog trip to Valencia, and during that time he described how he owns and manages a couple of rural guest houses in the beautiful countryside of Asturias in northern Spain. His passion for his home region and the restoration work he has done to restore his houses to their full glory shone through whenever we chatted. So I asked Juan to share his story on 501 Places:

The village of Antrialgo

More than fifteen years ago my family had a cottage in a sunny village called Antrialgo in the Council of Piloña, Asturias. This cottage used to be rented from time to time but it was not prepared to receive many people. We have always liked the countryside, and thinking about restoring a typical Asturian house with its wood and stones was an important challenge which would make us work in a different way.

The house during construction

We thought about making the two houses into one to avoid a very uneven piece of land and we aimed to build a typical Asturian rural house, while considering the design of a hotel. A long time ago rural tourism meant that your parents sent you to your family village during the summer, but now setting up a business in the countryside is part of an important economy run by entrepreneurs who do not necessarily live in a rural environment.

The house is finished and ready for guests

When we started to restore the house all the family worked on it, and even during the weekend we worked hard to be able to have it opened for the summer. When building a house for renting it is important to take into account that August is the peak season and it must be ready to welcome customers at this time.

Even harder than building the property was finding the name of a website in order to be visible on the internet which, although slowly at first, was starting to be used by many holidaymakers. The name we chose was that of the area where the house is settled; Campón de Antrialgo (www.campondeantrialgo.es). At that time many hotels did not have their own website and their email addresses were hosted on hotmail, which made them look bad in front of the customer.

Inside the house

We worked hard to create a quality brand although we realized that intangible things were not the key for customers to come to us. Our main worry was to be able to pay the loan we had asked for in order to mend the house, and to gauge our business to make sure we could get full occupancy during the busy days.

Inside the house

We met a lot of people: rural tourism allows you to be nearer to your customers and they even become our friends. Our tourists were and still are mainly domestic, and we have always thought that the real challenge is to make us well known in other countries. Every time we have German, Dutch or British customers we realize that there is still hard work to be done in order to sell our product in Europe.

We have been like this now for ten years, until by chance we were offered a chance to be part of what is known as Huerta San Benito. This has become one of the most important businesses in Asturias, being in several interior decoration magazines and being one of the 180 charming houses classified by the prestigious “Guia El País Aguilar”.

Currently we have a new focus, which is the conversation derived from social media. Being in rural surroundings does not mean that you can’t use the internet in a professional way with your customers, but it does mean that you must talk to them in order to foster your brand. Many of these customers have their own blogs, Twitter or Facebook accounts and they speak highly of us through these channels. Our business, although settled in the small community of Rural Tourism, has and uses the same online resources as any other firm.

Juan Otero Rionda was born in nearby Arriondas, and used to work for a large multi-national business before turning his passion to developing and managing the rural houses.

As well as looking after the growing business Juan also founded Ruralvalue, the first franchise of Rural Tourism in Spain and is the founder of Turismo.as, a forum to discuss Tourism and Technology that had its first meeting in Oviedo in April 2010.

When he is not working hard Juan can be found travelling around Asturias, constantly learning more about this region while enjoying its diverse gastronomy and beautiful landscapes. You can follow Juan on Twitter.

Lord's: the spritual home of cricket on a gloomy day

Cricket has a hard time selling itself to non-believers. In its original form (test match cricket) a game can last for five days, with each day lasting for around seven hours including breaks. And at the end of those five days? More than 1 in 3 finish as a draw.

The game stops when it’s raining, and also when the light is poor. So you might pay £40 for a ticket to one day of a five day game and spend an hour or two staring at an empty field while the players sit indoors waiting for the clouds to lift enough to satisfy the umpires that play can resume. See what I mean?

Yet if you’ve never been to a game and you happen to be passing through a major cricket country (India, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, England or the Caribbean) I would recommend a day at the cricket to see one of the world’s oldest sports and learn what is it about the game that so many of the local people find so fascinating.

Cricket: a statistician's dream

Cricket attracts a passionate following in its heartlands. In India and Australia crowds approaching 100,000 can squeeze into the huge stadiums to watch their national side. In England, trying to secure a ticket for an Ashes game against Australia (more on that later) is very difficult, and usually involves entering an over-subscribed lottery and hoping for the best.

People are willing to pay large sums of money to come to a game which is weather dependent (in England!) with the risk that they may see little play if the sun decides to take a day off. What is is about this strange game that captures the imagination?

England's batsmen emerge after a lunch break

Cricket on one level is a statistician’s dream. Batting and bowling averages, countless records, fifties, hundreds: there’s some milestone passed pretty much every hour of play. “These two batsmen have just passed the highest fourth wicket partnership for England against Bangladesh at Edgbaston” might be heard over the loudspeakers on a typical day.

Then there’s the intrigue of a five day game. A classic test match will change from one side being in the ascendancy to the other and back again several times before the end. Small incidents in an otherwise quiet period of play can influence the outcome of a match. A captain’s decision over where to place a fielder or who should bowl at a crucial time can swing the balance of a game decisively. I wonder if there are more subtleties and complex strategies in a Garndmaster chess match.

Haute cuisine is part of a day at the cricket

Spending a day at the cricket has developed into a peculiar ritual in recent years. Ask many supporters and they will list three main components of a good day’s cricket: beer, fast food and fancy dress. The beer starts to flow from early morning, and as the day wears on you’ll notice the singing levels increase, the inevitable Mexican wave circling the ground and some drunken idiot deciding that a 20ft high snake of empty beer glasses (plastic) is a good idea. The banter between opposing fans does however remain friendly and unthreatening.

There are always plenty of over-priced concession stands selling fish and chips, burgers, kebabs, and when the opposition are India or Pakistan, large vats of curry. And the fancy dress? It’s not uncommon to find troops of scantily-clad nuns, policewomen, Supermen or English knights among the crowd. I don’t know why; it’s just become part of the game in recent years.

T20: the sexed up version of cricket

Cricket has attempted to capture a wider audience by introducing a shorter three hour version of the game, aimed at TV audiences and part of a ridiculous attempt at wooing the American market (often denied). This T20 format of the game is particularly popular in India, where billions have been pumped into cricket’s equivalent of football’s Premier League.

Yet arguably the biggest occasion in the sport is known as the Ashes, when England take on Australia. Traditionally fierce rivals, the England team and the English media talk of little else for the four years between the times that the two sides play their contests. In recent years Australia has been dominant although their world domination appears to be over, and England will head to Australia later this year armed with their usual misplaced confidence. The atmosphere, the banter and beer-swilling always steps up a notch during an Ashes summer.

For me the five day game still emboddies what is best about cricket. There is something about watching even a day of a five day game, where no-one is in a hurry yet the game can take a dramatic turn at any point, that makes this a sport like no other. The happy acceptance of an unclear outcome, of weather delays or curtailment, and even moments where the crowd prays for rain to stop the game and prevent an impending defeat; cricket is certainly an acquired taste.

So if you are unfamiliar with the game and find yourself travelling through a cricket playing nation, why not take the chance to see a game for yourself? I would suggest that you tag along with a local who can explain what’s going on and guide you through the many rules of this historic sport. Oh, and don’t forget your umbrella.

It often ends up like this. Washed out and deserted