Seven Wonders and Counting
Everyone knows the term “seven wonders,” even if they don’t know what the list represents. Now it turns out no matter what the original list was (Seven Wonders of the Ancient World), now is the time to create a new list of Seven Wonders. Why try to improve on the wisdom of the ancient world? Well, for one reason, six of the seven wonders are long gone, and the seventh only exists because it’s hard to destroy what is already a pile of rubble, albeit symmetrical (the Pyramids of Giza). Now that it’s time for a modern list, in mandatory Web 2.0 fashion, the internet community is being asked to vote on them. (Reuters has the story, on Yahoo News.)
The list of 21 candidates includes such core adventure travel destinations as Machu Picchu in Peru, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Chichen Itza in Mexico, Timbuktu, Easter Island, and Stonehenge (currently the top choice). This suggests a new game: how many of the 21 Wonders have you been to? Should be easy to knock off the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, and Sydney Opera House for anyone with frequent flier miles. If you go to Rio for just to party, should you count the statue of Christ the Redeemer or do you have to be a believer? (Or redeemed?)
You can vote for your favorite new Seven Wonders sites at http://www.new7wonders.com/, and if you do vote at some point you’ll be offered the opportunity to purchase a certificate proving you did. There may be other promotional opportunities involved, as an IMAX film is also on the drawing boards documenting the final list. It looks like an interesting organization, whose other projects include reconstructing the 55-meter Bamiyan Buddha statues of Afghanistan, blown up by the Taliban in March 2001. Grounds right there for regime change, if anyone had asked me at the time.
Speaking of wonders, not that long ago we had weekly “Eight Wonders” columns at Yahoo in our adventure travel news blog. Our initial intent was to journey through the list of nations from Zed to Ace, Zimbabwe to Afghanistan, with various detours to countries to which we had other editorial coverage on Richard Bangs Adventures (such as Rwanda, Thailand and Australia). Soon, however, we decided that following the news might make a better criterion for list-building – for example, we had an Eight Wonders of Cuba column, in the wake of Fidel Castro’s recent health crisis. News generates links, after all, and our “numbers were being looked at.” Our Cuba list, and a related story on the outlook for a post-Castro Cuba by Tom Miller, got Y! front page coverage.
Flush with success, I pitched Eight Wonders of Lebanon. After all, its location in the heart of the Middle East gives it a front-row seat to over 3,000 years of history, its Phoenician culture was a well-known ancient maritime power, and its capital city, Beirut, was widely known at one point as the Paris of the Middle East. It was almost irrelevant that Israel was at the time lobbing bombs onto Lebanese soil, in response to offenses by the Hezbollah radical group. Though “travel” is often regarded as a news-free zone, exiled to the Sunday paper and other lifestyle outlets, it’s as plain as the terrorist living next door that there is no safe place anymore, and travel is too subject to the winds and whims of warfare, plague, politics, natural disasters or any combination thereof. (Interestingly, natural disasters are often safe topics for travel stories – witness the post-tsunami coverage of Thailand – whereas warfare usually isn’t.)
In any case, Yahoo’s news editors rejected the Eight Wonders of Lebanon idea, believing it was cynically trading on warfare. This, from a network that rescued Kevin Sites from obscure exile in Burma and rushed him over the border into Lebanon just in time to cover some street bombings. Kevin’s reporting got front-page coverage; our travel piece never saw the light of pixels.
A short time later the magic carpet was pulled out from under us, when Yahoo cancelled our project. So, taking nothing away from Hot Zone, but claiming a tiny piece of the online news domain for our own, stay tuned for the first episode in our second season with Eight Wonders of Lebanon, coming soon to a blogspot near you.
The list of 21 candidates includes such core adventure travel destinations as Machu Picchu in Peru, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, Chichen Itza in Mexico, Timbuktu, Easter Island, and Stonehenge (currently the top choice). This suggests a new game: how many of the 21 Wonders have you been to? Should be easy to knock off the Eiffel Tower, Statue of Liberty, and Sydney Opera House for anyone with frequent flier miles. If you go to Rio for just to party, should you count the statue of Christ the Redeemer or do you have to be a believer? (Or redeemed?)
You can vote for your favorite new Seven Wonders sites at http://www.new7wonders.com/, and if you do vote at some point you’ll be offered the opportunity to purchase a certificate proving you did. There may be other promotional opportunities involved, as an IMAX film is also on the drawing boards documenting the final list. It looks like an interesting organization, whose other projects include reconstructing the 55-meter Bamiyan Buddha statues of Afghanistan, blown up by the Taliban in March 2001. Grounds right there for regime change, if anyone had asked me at the time.
Speaking of wonders, not that long ago we had weekly “Eight Wonders” columns at Yahoo in our adventure travel news blog. Our initial intent was to journey through the list of nations from Zed to Ace, Zimbabwe to Afghanistan, with various detours to countries to which we had other editorial coverage on Richard Bangs Adventures (such as Rwanda, Thailand and Australia). Soon, however, we decided that following the news might make a better criterion for list-building – for example, we had an Eight Wonders of Cuba column, in the wake of Fidel Castro’s recent health crisis. News generates links, after all, and our “numbers were being looked at.” Our Cuba list, and a related story on the outlook for a post-Castro Cuba by Tom Miller, got Y! front page coverage.
Flush with success, I pitched Eight Wonders of Lebanon. After all, its location in the heart of the Middle East gives it a front-row seat to over 3,000 years of history, its Phoenician culture was a well-known ancient maritime power, and its capital city, Beirut, was widely known at one point as the Paris of the Middle East. It was almost irrelevant that Israel was at the time lobbing bombs onto Lebanese soil, in response to offenses by the Hezbollah radical group. Though “travel” is often regarded as a news-free zone, exiled to the Sunday paper and other lifestyle outlets, it’s as plain as the terrorist living next door that there is no safe place anymore, and travel is too subject to the winds and whims of warfare, plague, politics, natural disasters or any combination thereof. (Interestingly, natural disasters are often safe topics for travel stories – witness the post-tsunami coverage of Thailand – whereas warfare usually isn’t.)
In any case, Yahoo’s news editors rejected the Eight Wonders of Lebanon idea, believing it was cynically trading on warfare. This, from a network that rescued Kevin Sites from obscure exile in Burma and rushed him over the border into Lebanon just in time to cover some street bombings. Kevin’s reporting got front-page coverage; our travel piece never saw the light of pixels.
A short time later the magic carpet was pulled out from under us, when Yahoo cancelled our project. So, taking nothing away from Hot Zone, but claiming a tiny piece of the online news domain for our own, stay tuned for the first episode in our second season with Eight Wonders of Lebanon, coming soon to a blogspot near you.
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