New Orleans Jazz Fest 2008 streaming live webcast

Have a great Jazz Fest! We haven't made it back since Katrina washed us out and do miss the city a ton. Raise a toast to us and hope to see ya at JazzFest 2009!

If you're like us and can't make the fest this year, watch The New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival Live Webcast Exclusively live via AT&T Blue Room! http://www.attblueroom.com/music/
LIVE on the blue room May 3rd and 4th starting at 1PM EST. Featuring the best performances from the festival, the live webcast will include taped highlights from the first weekend.

See ya at the shows!

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have you seen Google Transit?

I'm not sure how long this has been around but I just discovered another cool product on Google. This is called Google Transit which invites riders of twenty-five transportation services in the United States, as well as eight other countries, to log onto Google Transit and plan their trip. It is still in beta, a standard tag on most Google products :)

I took the product for a test drive, trying to stump it. The NJ Transit option is only for trains so I attempted travel from North Bergen, New Jersey to the Port Authority Bus Terminal in New York City (a bus route, no trains conveniently located).
Estimated travel time: 2 hours (normally 20-30 minutes on the bus).

• Start out walking to the closest Light Rail station (about 30 minutes on foot)
• Take the light rail to Hoboken (about 15 minutes)
• take the Sufferen train to Secaucus Junction (opposite direction from NYC)
• Take Penn Station train (about 15 minutes)
• Walk to Port Authority (about 9 minutes)

Okay I admit my test wasn't very fair, because they don't offer NJ Bus options on the site yet, but even without any bus options, the test was a success, if a bit time consuming!

I gave it another try attempting to travel from Tampa, Florida to Penn Station in New York and received a polite message telling me they don't have transit schedule data for that trip. I was hoping to receive a message, "walk from Kennedy Boulevard in Tampa, Florida to Grant Street in Salem, New Jersey (over a thousand miles, wear comfortable shoes) and board a NJ Transit train hehe. No such luck.

This transit tool has huge potential. From the broad travel (I'm thinking door-to-door directions going trans-Atlantic) down to the granular level on a city bus, think of all the non-intrusive ads Google can sell along a route. Car service, coffee and breakfast enroute to the airport, parking at O'Hare, airlines, hotels, rental cars, tour agencies, a florist or dry cleaners at the destination of the bus.

I'm sure in a matter of time the google wizards will have options for "go from living room to kitchen and Avoid Highways". I'll take another look at Google Transit in a few months and see what evolves.

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