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I met some guy at the CS meetup on Thursday who claimed to make $1500-2000 a month just from his travel blog. I don't know much about what he does beyond write about his travels or how he promotes it, although he had a lot to say about SEO and other buzzwordy sorts of things. He asked me how I'm monetizing my own site and expressed shock at the "number of pages" I have on More Than Salad and that I was not yet making enough money to cover my travels around the world. He did have an interesting story involving leaving home at a young age and traveling non-stop for years. He lives in Thailand now, originally from Ireland, and had various adventures of all sorts living in loads of interesting countries. He was with another CSer who was an American living in Korea and they were passing through Hong Kong en route to Macau for a vacation of sorts though I didn't manage to get the whole story before pulled away into some other strange tale of adventure such as one often runs into at Couchsurfing meetups.

Last night I met up with two Couchsurfers and two of one of their friends for a vegetarian meal. I have begun to organize more vigorously vegetarian gatherings, specifically lunch and dinner at a different restaurant each day until I leave. It took me a while to settle into Hong Kong and get sufficiently over jetlag and so on to be able to effectively gather people, but now I have figured out that the best way to do it is just to post a time and place and people will either show up or not and not to bother trying to come up with a time and place that actually works for everyone. In last night's case, originally only person had confirmed and as I was walking to the restaurant to meet that person, they had texted me and bailed.

As an aside let me say that I have a SIM card in HK for the first time that supports data/internet access and it has been awesome. I have this new More Than Salad app for my phone which enables me to see a map in real-time of all vegetarian restaurants in proximity to my current location. I'm releasing on the Android market soon, maybe this week actually. I also can look things up instantly which is important for all the research I'm doing and useful for travel as well of course. Finally and most importantly, I installed Skype on my Android phone and was able to use it to call my mother for Mother's day for free, from Hong Kong. I think the quality is better than a normal phone call, it's free, and I can use it basically the same as my normal phone. A lot of people seem less amazed by that than I am.

So as I was saying, the person was busy at work and bailed, but we renegotiated a later time during which 3 more people texted me and were interested, and I ended up spending an hour in the park doing Tai Chi before meeting up and all of us enjoying an interesting vegetarian meal at a restaurant in Kowloon called Gaia, a sort of modernish Chinese/Buddhist vegetarian place inside of a mall.

I didn't have anything really focused to add here about what I'm doing and I've sort of digressed, but the actual real point was that in an experiment in monetization, I have added the hideous ad block you see at the top of this entry. I figure it is not too obtrusive and certainly can't hurt. Since there is now quite a lot of content in this blog, people seem to find their way to it randomly and who knows what useful or trivial thing they might uncover. Maybe I should add more pictures though...