¿Qué Pasa, Nicaragua?

Hi all, Carver here. I’ve been eagerly awaiting my first post on the MindBodyGreen blog, but I didn’t want to post just anything (I’ve been told this is an inappropriate venue for Lolcats). And because I’m one of the technology guys around here, I figured my first post would involve something...techy. However, I just took a really cool trip to Nicaragua, so I decided to talk about that!

Before I get into the parallels between my trip and the mission of MindBodyGreen, I have to say that Nicaragua is a gorgeous country full of friendly people, and thus an excellent vacation option. When I told people where I was going, I received quite a few “are you crazy?!” reactions. The conversation would then invariably lead to questions of safety. Many people recall the Contra war against the Sandinista-led government of the 80’s and do not realize that the political climate has been stable since the early 90’s. While this conflict severely damaged the nation’s economy and infrastructure, it is recovering at a brisk clip.

Today, Nicaragua is “the new Costa Rica.” Although true in some sense, this statement will elicit an eye-roll from expats, and likely worse from the locals who have a strong and proud cultural identity (not to mention a bit of bad blood with their southern neighbors). But in terms of tourism, the “gringos” are definitely coming. What is yet to be determined is how the infrastructure to support this tourism develops. The eventual existence of the megaresort is a near certainty, but there is also a nascent and timely eco-tourism movement that could tip the scales and put Nicaragua into a unique position as a truly “green” destination.

To quote Wikipedia, “Nicaragua is home to 78 protected areas covering over 20% of its landmass, and is home to 7% of the world’s biodiversity.” Now I’m no scientist, but that sounds pretty impressive. In each town we visited, there were businesses offering services for the eco-tourist – from nature guides and outfitters to eco-lodges. One of particular note was Morgan’s Rock, which is an eco-lodge just outside of San Juan del Sur on Nicaragua’s south Pacific coast. This place looks amazing, and I truly hope to make it back there for a stay. In an attempt to keep this post short I won’t go into the numerous online resources for such travel, as I assume you can all search Google just as well as I can. However, if you’re curious and looking for a great out-of-the-way spot for your next trip, I found this site to be a great resource.

Now I must add, and I think it goes without saying, that Nicaragua (or anywhere else for that matter) doesn’t require an “eco-friendly” tag to be enjoyed by the environmentally conscious. By its very nature it is eco-friendly in that it is relatively untouched by heavy industry and tourism, not to mention its own population. All one has to do is take a hike to the top of one of the many volcanoes, or rent a board and surf some of the best waves in the Pacific on any one of the beautiful, empty beaches. Just go before too many other people get the same idea!

Safe travels,

Carver

Turning Japanese

So here I am (this is Tim, by the way) in my hotel room in Tokyo. I'm over here just for a few days, so I'm not bothering to try and get my body onto local time, and the good news is that it gives me plenty of time between 2am and 9am to work on the MindBodyGreen site. The bad news? Having to decide whether to eat dinner or just pass out at 6pm.

Anyway, I thought this would be a good time to let you know what has been happening on the technical side of MBG, and this blog is the best place to do that. At least I thought it was until I logged into Blogger and it automatically detected that I was on my laptop in Tokyo and thought it would be fun to default all the text on the page to kanji.



It's not a surprise that Blogger would make the assumption that because I am logging on from Japan, I must read Japanese. The fact that I had to google a solution to my problem was a surprise. Thanks very much to Amit's article for the help.

But this brings me to a quick point I'd like to make about how our ranking works. Initially when Jason, Carver, and I were talking about how to do our ranking, we looked at all the actions users will take with the site. Clearly every action should have some effect on how a story gets ranked, but how much? I won't go into details of what affects the ranking and to what degree, needless to say that just about everything does.

One thing we hoped to avoid, at least initially, was what sites like Digg and reddit have been dealing with for some time - users gaming the system. We try to focus on positive stories on our site, and you've responded. We don't talk about "burying" stories, but give everyone the option to vote down a story he or she doesn't like, which does affect the ranking, but also removes the story from his or her hottest page. Statistically we get very few stories which receive negative votes, but we do get a lot of positive votes. When we created the site, we wanted to give each user the same voice that we had - anyone can post, anyone can vote, anyone can comment (we'd like to see a little more commenting, by the way!) We'd like to stress, though, anyone. We'd like to encourage users to register once and be honest with their voting. If you like a story, vote. Send it to your friends and share something great. Let the submitter know you like the story with a comment. Leave the ballot box stuffing to the professionals.

Oh, and what does Blogger thinking I'm in Japan have to do with that last paragraph? Well, we don't want our ranker to think about (groups of) people based on their IP address, but it might have to.

My Interview with Behance

Behance just posted the interview I did with Heather the other day. For those of you who aren't familiar with Behance, it's a great site whose goal is to better organize the creative community to make ideas happen. Here's an excerpt from the interview:

Jason Wachob has one goal in life: to create and run businesses that are focused on better, healthier, greener living. When first brought on as CEO of Crummy Brothers -- an organic cookie company now stocked in every Whole Foods Market in the US, his research on LOHAS (Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability) prompted him to found a side operation, MindBodyGreen, which aims to educate and inspire in a emphatic, direct Digg-like approach. Behance sat down with Jason to discuss product focus, personal investment and the rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurialism.

You can check out the entire interview here.