HOLISTICOPIA Newsletter, April 2002 By: Tim Johnson -- e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] website: http://www.holisticopia.com/
CONTENTS: QUOTE MISSION STATEMENT SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE WELCOME TO NEW SUBSCRIBERS OVERVIEW SECTION 1: THE HOLISTIC WORLD DIRECTORY SECTION 2. BOOKS CDs VIDEOS SECTION 3. THE HERBAGE DATABASE - ONLINE EDITION & CD ROM SECTION 4. THE LINK EXCHANGE QUOTE: �People deal too much with the negative, with what is wrong... Why not try and see positive things, to just touch those things and make them bloom?� ~Thich Nhat Hanh MISSION STATEMENT: To share information, tools and technology for global change -- focusing on both ancient and recently-developed holistic disciplines and methods of preventing illnesses before they can manifest. SUBSCRIBE/UNSUBSCRIBE If you are not interested in this kind of material, just unsubscribe. If you are interested, and this newsletter is being forwarded to you, please subscribe. If you know others who are looking for this type of knowledge, please forward to them and include my contact information. A big "thank you"to everyone who forwards this newsletter. WELCOME TO NEW SUBSCRIBERS Welcome and thank you for joining us. If you are not a subscriber and would like to be, please click here and send the blank email to me at [EMAIL PROTECTED] with "Subscribe" in the subject line. OVERVIEW Holisticopia is a website with several vast databases of holistic information. It is currently divided into four main sections. SECTION 1: THE HOLISTIC WORLD DIRECTORY This is a geographically-based database of holistic businesses and destinations worldwide, classified by continent, country, state or province, city, and category. The initial inspiration came from the great deal of world traveling I have done over the years, and the guide books I would use on those trips often gave very little specialized holistic information but instead focused on general travel information. I was living in San Francisco, California, where it is very easy to maintain a �holistic� lifestyle - but I found that upon arrival at a new destination I would sometimes fall out of my usual holistic bubble and end up eating less healthy, and living less healthy, because I did not know where to go. So I started gathering information, from a wide variety of online sources, about businesses and destinations worldwide, and breaking them down in a database. Because of the vast scope of this project (it contains over 280,000 listings), sometimes I would include information! a! bout places that cannot really be construed as strictly �holistic� but still would be of interest to a traveler in a new place, for sightseeing purposes perhaps - or just to get a better understanding of what makes that particular place unique, or even particular areas to avoid because of certain dangers. I also included as much local history, maps, and news as I could, and this database is now also useful as a general information source for any given place on the planet - so when you read the daily headlines about news in some far-off land, you can use this database to get background information on that place, as well as news coverage generated from the place itself. But mostly - I focused on categories that would be of interest to the holistically-interested traveler, creating many thousand local directories. I found it easiest to find information about the United States, and I especially focused on California, because that is where I live. Some of the categories I included in this database are: Acupressure, Acupuncture, Addiction And Recovery, Alexander Technique, Alternative Clinics, Alternative Clinics, Alternative Scene, Amazon, Ambience, Ancestral Homeland, Ancient Structures, Animism, Aquatic Physical Therapy, Archeology, Architecture, Aromatherapy, Art Museums, Artesania Stalls, Artesian Wells, etc. I guess I figured that while I was in there, gathering information, I might as well gather as much about as many topics as possible. I used be gainfully employed as a data miner for a variety of organizations, most notably - banks. Banks have a lot of data. So I utilized the esoteric data mining techniques I myself developed over many years of trial and error to apply to this task of mapping world places - specifically, Holistic places - whatever that means to you. I was a data miner and web developer during the San Francisco dot.com boom years, and used to make a pretty good living as a contractor. So between contracts, I would go on extended trips - including one half-year round-the-world soujourn, several tours of Europe, a few trips to Mexico and South and Central America. I usually used the Lonely Planet guidebooks. But are not really geared toward my demographic anymore, as I am getting older, and more interested in specific things. You can only see so many museums, an! d ! tourist ghettoes, and the same sight that everyone else is sightseeing. So I created this database of the World, which is now online, and quite wonderful. Also - eventually I got tired of full-time computer work, so I would work part-time as a massage therapist. I did this for several years, working on many hundreds of clients. I KNOW that the world needs a good massage. Over the last couple months, I added the capability for people to add their own listings to this database - following a similar model to how Google.com handles their advertising. You can now add your own general listing, so that people can find you when looking for whatever modality you might practice, wherever you might be geographically situated. Also - if you want to stand out amongst the crowd - I also offer �preferred listings�, which appear at the top of the pages. Regular listings can now be placed for $15 for one year, while preferred listings go for $55. At the moment, holisticopia.com receives on the average about 1000 unique visitors a day, though I expect that will go up, as I have finished the initial development and have more time to get the site listed in all the usual places. Promotion is a long a labourious process in and of itself. So far most of the traffic to this site is from word-of-mouth, and from searches on Google.com. SECTION 2. BOOKS CDs VIDEOS This is another fairly large database - of books, CDs, and Videos, which I thought would be of interest to the holistically-inclined. There are some 25,000 titles listed - with most of the links going directly to Amazon.com. I have recently, within the past couple weeks, opened up this directory so that authors and publishers can add their own listings - and I am offering this service free of charge. So please add as many as you like! I would like to see this grow into a great online library. SECTION 3. THE HERBAGE DATABASE - ONLINE EDITION & CD ROM This is a very large database about herbs, where they grow, what their names are, and how they have been used by indigenous people throughout the world. This database was collected over a ten-year period. At first, it included the plant properties mentioned in various books, which yielded information about some 800 species. Later, information was gathered that was already digitized and stored in several online databases. This made it possible to expand the scope to 28,659 species, and in doing so, to yield a clearer picture about each individual species. In late 1998, the print version was published - the CRC Ethnobotany Desk Reference. This may be the largest-scope materia medicae ever. To obtain the same information about any species listed, you would have to thumb through hundreds of herbal guides, ethnobotanical manuals, and regional field guides. Sources for this index include the three largest U.S. Government ethnobotany databases, the U.S. National Park Service NPFlo! ra! plant inventory lists, and 18 leading works on the subject. The arrangement of this material will be of interest to those all over the world who study plants and their uses: botanists, ethnobotanists, entheobotanists, pharmacists, forensic investigators, and the traditional healers of thousands of diverse cultures. Here is one review of the CRC Ethnobotany Desk Reference: �An excellent encyclopedic database of the reported ethno-pharmacological and medicinal applications of a vast array of medicinal plants. Medical and dental problem organization provided in index, with the listing of the common and taxonomical names for plants, reported medical/dental applications within purported cultural and regional environments. No plant drawings or pictures available for cross reference but this publication remains an excellent �one text� reference for a rapid review of known world wide medicinal plants.� -Dr Michael Colvard, Univ. IL. at Chicago The book version was purchased primarily by University libraries, including: The University of Montana Libraries, UCLA Biomed Library, Oxford College of Emory University, University of Otago New Zealand, Washington University, University of Nevada Las Vegas, University of New South Wales Australia, University of Tennessee, MIT, Univerity of Alberta Canada, Millikin University, Kent State, University of Maine, Smith College, CSU Hayward, University of New Mexico, Universit�t Wien, University of California Berkeley, Harvard Univerity, etc. But I never really intended to have this be a print work - a book. For many years (since 1992) I have maintained a website - herbweb.com - which contained an abridged version of the database. More recently, I have learned enough about new web development technology, specifically the Linux - Apache - MySQL - PHP (LAMP) architecture - which is low-cost way to put a large database like this on the World Wide Web, to be able to finally publish the entire database online for the first time, which is an event that occurred last month. And I was pleased, and rather surprised, at the new image searching capabilities now offered by Google.com, so that each species listing has a link into a Google image search, which produces many lovely photographs of each species. But there are still limitations - each query result produces a list of sometimes many hundreds of plants, and the web is sometimes slow - especially when many people are using the database simultaneously. The only way to really �get into� the data, as I have had the unique experience of doing over the years, is to have it on your own personal computer. So to make this possible, I have recently released it on a CD ROM, in the original Microsoft Excel for Windows spreadsheet. Herbage v1.0 can be ordered online from Holisticopia, for $199.95. There is a link to the order form at the bottom of every page in the herb section. SECTION 4. THE LINK EXCHANGE This is a brand new section, with very few listings as of yet. If you are a webmaster with a website of your own, I invite you add a link to Holisticopia.com, and in exchange, I will add a link to your website. I do not charge any money for this. The purpose of a link exchange is to bring both of our websites higher in various search-engine rankings. On Google, for example, a website with a lot of links to it comes up higher on a search. So if you search Google for �holistic directory� currently, you will not find Holisticopia - because not enough people have added links to it, as of yet - because it is relatively new. If you search for herbweb.com - the site I began in 1992 - it comes up high in the rankings because many thousands of websites now have links to it. I welcome any suggestions you might have as to how I might best apply myself now that this colossal undertaking is finally nearing its fruition. Much love and blessings, Tim Johnson Santa Cruz, California April 8, 2002 ============================================================== TO SUBSCRIBE: If this Newsletter is being forwarded to you, send a blank e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with Subscribe in the subject line. TO UNSUBSCRIBE: Send a blank e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] There is no paid advertising in the newsletter ============================================================== Copyright (c) 2002, Tim Johnson. It would be my pleasure to have you reproduce, copy or distribute the Holisticopia Newsletter in full or in part. Just be sure to include the copyright and my contact information, below. Tim Johnson Researcher, Author, Herbalist, Massage Therapist, Web Developer [EMAIL PROTECTED] ==^================================================================ . . ================================================================= Instructions for joining and leaving this list, remarks about the problem of INAPPROPRIATE MESSAGES, and archives are available at: . http://jse.stat.ncsu.edu/ . =================================================================
