World Reviewer blog

This week’s best postings come from very opposite ends of the ‘experiences’ spectrum. The ‘The Gay Ghost of The George Hotel‘ in Swaffham, UK, posted by paranormal expert Johnny Blythe, describes an investigation into a ‘green lady’ with the aid of laser thermometers, and a ‘presence’ in the hotel’s dry goods room who was trying to unzip a staff members’ trousers. Weird goings on indeed…

The second, by rainforest explorer Paul Beaver, describes an Encounter with Isula Ant (Paraponera clavata) , one of the ‘true terrors of the Amazon’. They have a retractable abdominal stinger whose sole purpose is to inject neurotoxic venom.

Not sure which is worse..

We have just added a RSS feed to worldreviewer. For the non-geeks out there this basically means that you can subscribe to the latest experiences posted on worldreviewer, so that you have a list in your browser without having to keep checking back on our homepage (although we hope you do!). The feed is located here: Worldreviewer latest experiences. If you want more information on news feeds, including help on subscribing, here is an excellent introduction.

Too much wind was a crashing blow to the Balloon Fiesta experience, though our expert Phil Dunnington was an excellent speaker and had some very interesting stories; and we did shoot the army motorbiking squad jumping four cars end to end and four golf carts (though we don’t have a motorcross category, maybe we should? It was pretty exciting.). We also shot miniature pony chariot races, a helicopter with no doors and some skydivers.

It didn’t feel that windy…

After the minor success of our first mini travelogue in Bath we have now posted our second video to the site ‘World Reviewer at the Royal Observatory’. Despite the less than glamorous title we hope you enjoy our wander around the grounds of both the newly opened Planetarium and the historic Observatory. Though the kindly security staff allowed us to film inside the Planetarium it’s not really set up well for it and the picture is too dim and grainy so you’ll have to make do with my description. You can check it out here: World Reviewer at the Royal Observatory.

Nathan and I will also be travelling to the Bristol International Balloon Fiesta this weekend to interview our balloon experts and collect some more of our experiences on film. If you’re taking part in anything interesting please keep me posted (at the moment only if you’re in the UK - but that may change?) so we can try and get some footage for the site.

The new design of the site will be loaded up soon - the layout is similar to what we have at the moment but it looks a little more seamless - so don’t get a shock if you go to log in and suddenly things don’t look quite as you remembered them! We also have an RSS and Flickr feed set up (as requested by a couple of our experts) so if you would like your Flickr photos or your blog to appear on your Experts page you’ll be able to load them up. I will be another way for people to find out a bit more about what our experts are doing.

After that we’ll be preparing for the press launch so if you haven’t already got your top recommendations loaded please try and get them up in the next month.