Traveling the World - 91 Days At A Time
We're so happy that, thanks to @sndbox, we have another chance to introduce ourselves, after our first introduction when we joined Steemit in December, 2017. Let's just say, that first intro was a little half-hearted; to be honest, we weren't all that familiar with Steemit back then, and kept things short. This time we'll go a bit more into details. It might be long, but I promise, it won't be boring.
Who Are We?
We're Jürgen Horn and Michael Powell. We met in Boston in 1999.Jürgen grew up in Germany. After starting a career path towards a business degree, he realized that working in an office was not the path he wanted to go down. So he became an Au Pair and went to United States in 1998 to help to take care of three kids (who are now all grown up). In 1999 he started a program at the New England School of Photography in Boston where he received his Diploma with two honors.
Michael was raised in a small-town in Ohio. After graduating from Ohio University with degrees in Computer Science and Spanish, he got his first big job in Boston, working for a small software company.
When Jürgen's visa ran out, we decided to move to Germany together, and landed in Berlin, where we lived for five years. During that time, Mike's company went under, and so we had time to develop a few of our own internet projects:
Lastminute Auction Our very first website, where we list all the auctions on eBay, which are still at only one dollar with one hour left. This website exploded and has been running for over 14 years, providing us with a good amount of income, even to this day.
Criticker A movie recommendation site based on a very accurate taste prediction algorithm. Over the past 12 years, we've grown with a great community of movie buffs and have recently extended the algorithm to TV series and gaming as well.
Working on these websites gave us a lot of freedom, and we were able to support ourselves. After five years in Berlin, we wanted to concentrate on our projects and decided to move to a tiny, tiny town in Western Ireland, with hardly over 100 people (and suddenly, two foreign gay guys!) We ended up living there for one and a half years; it was beautiful and remote, but also very overcast! We felt ourselves becoming more pale and pasty with every passing day, and knew we needed to get somewhere with more sun. A friend of our suggested Valencia, Spain. We booked tickets to go check it out, and knew right away this would be the city for us. We fell in love with the city right away, and it's a feeling that persists to this day, ten years later.
For 91 Days Travel Blog Was Born
Even though we were enjoying Valencia, we still had itchy feet, and found ourselves switching apartments constantly. One day, while having lunch, we were talking about yet another move, and suddenly had an idea... why not just always be on the move? We could live in a place for a comfortable amount of time, allowing us to continue working on our websites, but also take the time to explore our new home and write about it. We thought visiting four locations a year sounded perfect, so we divided 365 by 4, and For 91 Days was born. I'd also like to note that, when we started, I'd never heard of the term Travel Blog (even though later I found out there were a handful) and Digital Nomads as a tribe didn't exist at all!In the last 8 years we visited these locations in order:
- Oviedo, Spain
- Savannah, USA
- Buenos Aires
- Bolivia
- Palermo, Sicily
- Sri Lanka
- Busan, South Korea
- Idaho, USA
- Istanbul
- Iceland
- Yucatan, Mexico
- Tokyo
- Macedonia
- Valencia (buying an apartment, and making this our permanent home when not traveling)
- Curacao
- Montreal
- South Vietnam
- North Vietnam
- Lisbon
How Did You End Up On Steemit?
We were growing more and more frustrated with the conventional social networking platforms. Right from the beginning, we had built a community on Facebook, Twitter and Youtube, and later Instagram. At first, everything was great; we used them as aggregators to notify our followers of new posts on our blog. But over the years we noticed a change. Barely anyone ended up on our website (where we had our ads). In fact, Facebook kept bothering us to buy boosts, so that people would actually see the things we were posting. Social platforms grew and began to dominate everyone's time, until it reached a point that almost nobody ended on our actual blog. After learning about the billions in profit that Facebook was making by injecting ads between other people's content and harassing creators like us to buy "boosts", we had enough! It's our content, so why is all the profit going to you?!
During our last For 91 Days, in Lisbon, we kept reading about @steemfest and @steemit. We missed Steemfest by two weeks. To be honest, at that time we had no idea what the platform was all about, but we were intrigued, so we signed up and started to get a feel for it. We soon realized that Steemit could be the perfect platform for people like us, but recognized that there wasn't yet an organized community to bring travelers together. So we started the Steemit Traveler discord channel, soon thereafter connecting with @jpphotography, @rimicane, @adonisabril ... and the idea of curating travel content through @travelfeed was born.
The current core team consists of @rimicane, @jpphotography, @guchtere and @for91days(and a big thank you to @wanderlass who had to stop being a member of Travelfeed). And we've inspired at least one other group, called @cyclefeed which sprung out of our curation project, but focuses on cycling. It's run by @mrprofessor, @robmolecule and @twowheeledmonkey
Your Future On The Blockchain?
We're still very new on Steemit and every day we're learning something about the platform, the blockchain and crytocurrencies in general. We're eager to learn more about Steemit's soon to be implemented Smart Media Tokens and would love to integrate them on @critickerand on our travel blog, For 91 Days. Furthermore we want to grow @travelfeed, the TravelFeed Wordpress Blog, maybe bringing in more outside of Steemit travel bloggers, digital nomads and writers on board. We want to encourage both new and established users to grow and invest into Steemit. And we'll always be there to help others with information and support.And most importantly we want to continue to produce great travel content ourselves, and share it on Steemit. We finally found a home here on the platform and are grateful to be able to connect with so many amazing people, something we weren't able to archive in eight years of using conventional social media platforms.
There are so many people I'd like to thank for their kindness, will power, inspiration and support! You know who you are!
This post was authored by @for91days , a member of the sndbox incubator. Learn more, follow @for91days or begin a conversation in the comment section below.
Empower artists, writers, musicians, non-profits and community initiatives - delegate Steem Power to @sndbox (using the links below) or follow our curation trail. Learn more about Sndbox - watch our introduction, here.
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://sndbox.blog/traveling-the-world-91-days-at-a-time/
Great to meet you guys. It's very encouraging to get to see the faces and read the stories behind curators / user names.
Michael, i also attended OU, from 2001-2003 (Ellis Hall was my patio), but i had a bunch of friends around Gordy Hall; took some summer classes there.
It looks like you guys have amazing plans and i am looking forward to learning from you.
I did not know about your movie site; sounds great, I'll check it out.
I actually became more of a movie fan thanks to Alden Library's film collection.
It was paradise to me to be able to have access any movie i could think of. I remember borrowing all movies winners of or nominated to the Oscars from 1929. That was crazy.
Your travel blog experience sounds amazing. Reminds me of Around the World in Eighty Days.
No way ... You also went to OU??? I'm going to tell Mike. I think he graduated 1999 not sure. Because 99 we met in Boston. He actually took somewhat recently to Athens, OH to show off the campus and to his favorite bars. We even got inside the old house. FILTHY .. hahah. We also we do a Top 20 and Top Worse Movies of the year, right before the year ends.
It would be great to grow the movie account here on Criticker as well! Maybe you're interested?
I'd love to. I just registered in the site. Will be exploring it in the next days. Unfortunatelly i do not have a lot of internet available time, and the service is not always reliable, but i do my best to be around. Thank you, guys.
Thank you for taking the time to check out Criticker.
@sndbox well knowing about the team is really encouraging signs for others. 91 days move on discovering and exploring things is just similar to life of seafarer who on ship keeps on moving from one place to another but all time stays on ship surrounded with water. I hope you understand what I mean.
Do you every get antsy being on a ship? How often do you hit land? Do you write about it when you're on land?
First of all I love my job being on ship and to answer ur question of how often we touch land, it depends which type of ship. I been on a ship where we touches land twice a day but stay was awful because its too short and experienced long sailing of even 40 days at a stretch but in normally those cases we stay on land for almost a week at a stretch. I have never written before about my ship life. recently I joined steemit in august month only and that's the time I started writing about it. my first topic on steemit was the beginning for that and I will surely continue with that and bring 3rd part soon. so far 2 posts abt shipping life.
Thanx for asking
A pleasure to meet friends
It's a pleasure to meet you too. Have you had a chance to check out our project? If so, what do you think?
Really glad you made it to steem, we really need quality content and awesome people to grow the community :)
We've been creating content for 8 years - and got a like here and there but on Steemit we feel like being at home. Thank you for your kind words.
Wow !
how nice travel around real world with steemworld :)
'스파'시바(Спасибо스빠씨-바)~!
Thank you. You're from Korea? We did a For91days in Busan and loved it. Miss the food badly :)
i'm in Seoul :)
Busan food especially seafood and
돼지국밥(dwaejigukbap) is best !fantastic we are in steemworld :)
'스파'시바(Спасибо스빠씨-바)~!
Well welcome, again! This is such an interesting story.
As an American, I love to spend part of my year overseas. How did you manage to live in the countries for so long and even now? I'd love to move there full time, but the visa thing is always so tricky. I know it is a bit off topic, but always asking questions when I see other's successfully do it :)
It is amazing how much our digital lives are growing and the digital community seems to keep opening up to allow us to make new roles and enjoy becoming things like 'digital nomads' and 'digital artists'. It is truly an exciting time. I can't wait to get more into your other sites and the idea of the ebay last minute is pure genius!
Looking forward to perusing your travel blog!
Sorry it has been a while to answer. Mike and I are married and since I'm European he has the right of movement, so he can stay in Europe without any problems. For outside of Europe we get visas, or stay not longer than 3 month if it's allowed. Or we do visa runs just to stay within the laws of each country.
Yes, thanks to the Internet we're enjoying so much freedom and unthinkable without it to live a life like this.
Really loved your comment!