Demo Girl

There’s this person I know, I’ll just call her Mom for the sake of this post, who is notorious for checking into a hotel and then switching rooms over and over because something is just not right. I never really had a problem with this because we always ended up getting a great room and she had no problem paying for it – she just wanted the perfect place to relax. She’s been talking about making a trip up to San Francisco to check out my new digs, and I know it will be my job to scout out the perfect hotel and hotel room. This is how TripKick is going to save my you-know-what.

TripKick is all about room reviews. They provide you with details like noise, size, and views of specific rooms located in a hotel. Before I go any further I should add that TripKick is only available (right now) in Boston, Chicago, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, NYC, Orange County, San Diego, San Francisco, and Washington D.C., but they have plans to add a new major city every month. You can search for specific criteria such as pet friendly, romantic, or trendy and then TripKick will list the hotels with rooms that match your request. You’ll see a list of the best rooms and you can read and leave reviews and add photos. You don’t need to sign up either, just leave your name and email address with your review. TripKick also has a compare feature which will compare rooms by view, noise, size, location within the hotel, and bathroom notability. You can print all this info out and bring it with you when you check in so you’ll be more knowledgeable up front, and shouldn’t have to worry about switching rooms later. For my sake, let’s hope the reviews on TripKick are correct. Otherwise, I’m sicking my Mom on you. Here’s my screencast tour of TripKick:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 4m20s

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[via TechCrunch]

Blip is a social networking site for sharing, “what are you listening to?”. If you think it sounds a lot like Twitter, you’re exactly right. It works in almost the same way except instead of letting people know that you just drank a delicious milkshake, you can share the music you’re listening to. You can do a search by song or artist and Blip will pull music from SeeqPod that you can preview and then “blip” to your friends. You can also leave a message (150 characters or less) to go along with your song. You can also cross post to Twitter, Pownce, FriendFeed, and Tumblr – sort of. This is where I had an issue with Blip. When I chose a song and then typed a brief message explaining why I chose that song, it posted fine to Blip. When I jumped over to my Twitter profile, I noticed that it had not posted my message at all. This is exactly what it said, “listening to Uncle John’s Band – The Greatful Dead at www.fuzz.com/blip/us”. I was a little perturbed that what I posted to Blip was completely different than what appeared on my Twitter profile.

My final thoughts? Well, I think Blip is great for people who want a place to quickly share music with a group of friends and hear what their friends are listening to. Twitter isn’t for everyone and Blip is great for doing what it wants to do, share music. I won’t, however, be cross posting to any other sites using Blip unless this issue is fixed.  Update:  I was contacted by the guys at Blip about the Twitter posting catastrophe and they completely fixed the problem!  Now your message will show up on Twitter as it does on Blip.  Thanks guys! I currently use Songza to post songs I like to Twitter, and I think I’ll stick with them for that purpose. Here’s my screencast tour of Blip:

Click Here To Watch The Screencast 2m26s

Want this screencast on your site? Click here to get the code for this and other DemoGirl screencasts!

[via Go2WEB20]