Photo: Associated Press

by Tom Loftus

Chances are not single a travel reporter was among the thousands attending yesterday's keynote address at the Apple's Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco.  But the newly-announced Apple iPhone 3G is sure to appear in the pages of various travel web magazines in the months to come.  The  "iPhone 3G is real! GPS looks like a killer app" reads the lead from yesterday's post on the tech blog CrunchGear. 

For the first time, the iPhone will combine Assisted GPS (A-GPS), a faster version of traditional satellite-derived data combined with Wi-Fi hot spots, and cellular towers.   The three technologies can work in tandem or separately, as the Apple web site explains.

If GPS is available, iPhone displays a blue GPS indicator. But if you're inside--without a clear line of sight to a GPS satellite--iPhone finds you via Wi-Fi. If you're not in range of a Wi-Fi hot spot, iPhone finds you using cellular towers.

The Originator.

by Tom Loftus

For the casual music fan, yesterday's death of Bo Diddley may have brought no more than a fleeting memory of a scratchy black-and-white film of a 1950s rock and roller playing a box-shaped guitar. Bo Diddley? Aw, yes, didn't he do that "Tutti Fruitti" song? (Ed.: No, that's Little Richard.)  

But as the obituaries piled in yesterday, it was obvious that the Originator, as Bo Diddley called himself, deserves recognition in the world music scene.

Here's Keith Richards's take on Bo Diddley in an interview with Neil Strauss, republished on Rollingstone.com yesterday:

"Muddy [Waters] and Chuck were close to the straight electric blues," he said. "But Bo was fascinatingly on the edge. There was something African going on in there. His style was outrageous, suggesting that the kind of music we loved didn't just come from Mississippi. It was coming from somewhere else."

Empty seats did them in.

by Tom Loftus

It's getting to be commonplace. This morning it was the all-business-class carrier Silverjet's turn to refresh its homepage with a letter beginning, "To our dear customers..." 

Sixteen months after its inaugural flight, the airline known for its fully reclinable seat/beds joined fellow all-business-classers Eos Airlines and MAXjet Airways Inc. in the good idea/sorry breaks category.

Bloomberg does a nice summary of Silverjet's demise--rising fuel prices, an inability to secure a last-minute loan--and unloads a bomb from analysts at Numis Securities: "There are likely to be a number of spectacular casualties as brutal economic reality hits home.''

Troncones, Mexico.
Photo: Melanie Acevedo/CNT

New! Several times a week, the Daily Traveler will spotlight a travel news item by taking a look at how it is reported by the growing mass of travel-based blogs, magazines, and assorted Web sites. We call this section the Aggregator.

by Tom Loftus

Surf paradise Zihuatanejo, Mexico, has been the site of three shark attacks, two of them fatal, in the past month. Jaunted.com uses the opportunity to add the area to its Killer Beaches 2008, a Google mashup documenting recent shark attacks worldwide. Gadling.com also runs a post on the attack, although it makes the mistake of running a photo of the fearsome-looking, but harmless sand tiger shark. The shark(s) in question may be greys or tigers.