Got Travel? Travel Blogs and Travel Bloggers, Unite!
For some time (100,000 years in internet dog years), I’ve wanted to collect *all* the travel blogs in one spot and organize them by destination. That’s not happening … yet … but I’m very happy to see so many great folks online blogging travel now as well as many lists of bloggers popping up.
An interesting issue in finding the holy grail of travel information is whether people would rather hear from *travelers* or from *locals*. I used to lean to the former – ie I wanted to hear from other folks who had visited a place to get the best information, but it’s become clear to me now that the best source for travel information are well informed local folks – ideally those who are in the travel industry and therefore familiar with a lot of attractions, hotels, restaurants, history, customs, etc. An example for Oregon is … me.
I worked in the travel industry for many years and I know a *lot* about Oregon, especially Southern Oregon. Unfortunately there are not very many people blogging “local travel” from a local perspective. Ironically pretty much all the travel writing blog folks (including me) are so busy talking about their own trips out and about, they are not writing much about their local places – the kind of information that would be simply wonderful if you were to visit a place.
So … my challenge to travel bloggers is to write a few posts about things to see and do in your own neck of the woods. Let me know if you do and I’ll be happy to feature it prominently at our heavy traffic site ”Travel and History”. Please include a bit of history in the travelogue if you can.
Here are some from some cool traveling folks:
Blogs/ Travelers list from Traveling Teri:
- 1step2theleft
- 20sTravel
- 501 Places
- Abigail King
- Adventure Girl
- Adventure Living
- Agent Cikay
- Alex Berger
- Almost Fearless
- Andi Perullo
- Andrew G. Hayes
- Andy Murdock
- Around the World “L”
- As We Travel
- Aussie Nomad
- Bairds Travel
- Beth Arnold
- Bike Raft
- Boots n All
- Border Jumpers
- Brendan von Son
- Brian Swan
- Brooke Schoenman
- Budget Travel Sacramento
- Cailin O’Neil
- Cal Bosch
- Candice Walsh
- Cara Lopez Lee
- CC Burns
- CG Travels
- Christine Amorose
- Couch Surfing Ori
- Dave’s Travel Corner
- David Lytle (davitydave)
- Diana Ellefson
- Docudramaqueen
- Don Nadeau
- Donna L. Hull
- Drifting Focus
- Dustin Main
- Earth Explorer
- Eat Live Travel Write
- Elite Travel Gal
- ELoren
- Erica Kuschel
- Everywhere Trip
- Fodor’s Travel Guides
- Fox Nomad
- Gadling
- Gerard Ward
- Girls Getaway
- GloboTreks
- Got Passport
- Got Saga Latino
- Got Saga
- Grumpy Traveller
- Happy Go Lucky
- Harriett Baskas
- Holiday Greece
- I Live to Travel
- Isabelle’s Travel Guide
- Janelle Norman
- Jason’sTravels
- Jeff Titelius
- JoAnna Haugen
- Jason’sTravels
- Joe Hunkins
- Johnny Vagabond
- Journeywoman
- Kevin May
- Kim Mance
- LandLopers
- Larry Blanken
- Legal Nomads
- LJ Rose Expeditions
- Lonely Planet
- Malaysia-Asia
- Margaret Kinney
- Monica Wong
- My Journey of a Lifetime
- My Melange
- National Geographic
- Neverending Voyage
- New York Times Travel
- Nomadic Chick
- Nomadic Matt
- Ottsworld
- ParisBuff
- PatriciaVance, GotSaga
- Pauline Frommer’s Travel
- Perrin Post
- Peter Greenberg
- Richard Escobar
- Rick Steves
- RTWDave
- Runaway Juno
- Sam Daams
- SaraKateTravel
- Secured Traveler
- Serendipity Traveler
- Shawnosaurus
- Smart Women Travelers
- Solo Friendly
- Solo Traveler
- Sosauce
- Soultravelers3
- Spencer Spellman
- Spunky Girl Monologues
- Stay Adventurous
- Stay Bank
- Sumit Gupta
- Susan Farlow
- Suzy Guese
- Technomadia
- Thank God I Surf
- The Jungle Princess
- The Longest Way Home
- The Mad Traveler Online
- The Planetd
- The Roaming Boomers
- The Tashinga Initiative
- The Travel Tart
- The Travel Tweeter
- The Trip Chicks
- Tiffany Travels
- Timesonline Travel
- Travel Answerman
- Travel Blogger
- Travel Bully
- Trailer Campers
- Travel Cuts
- Travel Designed
- Travel Dudes
- Travel Girl (smultronställen)
- Travel Happy
- Traveling Anna
- Traveling Perly
- Traveling Savage
- Traveling Ted
- Traveling Teri
- Travels of Adam
- Travelocity
- Travel Off the Cuff
- Travel Optimist
- Travel Maus
- Travel Muse
- Travel Savvy Mom
- Travel Squire
- Travel Susan
- Travelwriticus
- Trey Ratcliff
- Tuscan Blog
- Unbrave Girl
- Uncornered Market
- Vagabond3Italian Notes
- Vagabondish
- Velvetescape
- Wandering-off
- Wanderings of a Travelbug
- Wandering Trader
- Want to Go Travel
- Welcome Tuscany
- Wend Magazine
- Where I’ve Been
- Wild Junket
- World Nomads
Blogroll from Travel Answer Man John Van Kirk:
- Academic Earth
- Almost Fearless
- Around the World
- Art of Non-Conformity
- Blog Catalog
- BootsnAll
- Briefcase to Backpack
- Budget Travel
- Common Sense and Whiskey
- Cool Business Ideas
- Cool Tools
- Cool Travel Guide
- Cruise Reviews
- Curious Expeditions
- Development Blog
- Documentation
- Earthquake News
- Eating the Motherland
- Enduring Wanderlust
- Engadget
- Escape From New York
- Ethical Traveler
- Euro Cheapo
- Ever the Nomad
- Everything Everywhere
- Family Travellogue
- Gadling
- Geotraveler’s Niche
- Gizmodo
- Global Scavenger Hunt
- Global Security News & Reports
- Global Voices Online
- Go Nomad
- Green Blogs
- Gridskipper
- Happy Hotelier
- Health Ranger
- Hobo Traveler
- Hoosta Magazine
- Hostel Buenos Aires
- Hotel Blogs
- i Kangaroo
- Indie Travel Podcast
- Intelligent Travel
- Intrade
- Japan Visitor
- Jaunted
- John McCabe
- Kyle Keeton
- Las Vegas
- Legal Nomads
- Life Clever
- Life Hack
- Luxury Latin America
- Luxury Travel Blog
- Metro Blogging
- Miss Expatria
- MJ Perry
- Moroccan Mary
- Mr and Mrs Smith
- My Itchy Travel Feet
- National Parks Traveler
- New York City
- Newyorkology
- No Debt World Travel
- Nomadic Matt
- Notes from the Road
- One World Travel and Tourism
- Perrinpost
- Peter Greenberg
- Plugins
- Rick Seaney
- Roaming Tales
- Rolling Rains Report
- Routes International
- Saving Advice
- Science Daily
- Seat 61
- Seth Godin
- Slow Travel
- Small Time Traveller
- Smithsonian Journeys
- Southern Cone Guide Books
- Suggest Ideas
- Support Forum
- Synthesis
- The Dollar Stretcher
- The Travelers Zone
- The World By Sea
- Themes
- Travel Answer Man
- Travel Beautiful
- Travel Blog
- Travel Blogs
- Travel Booklocker
- Travelers Lunch Box
- Traveling Mamas
- Traveling Teri
- Travelizmo
- Tree Hugger
- Ubertramp
- Unearthing Asia
- Vagablogging
- Vagabondish
- Virtual Tourist
- Walking and Drinking Beer
- WalletPop
- Wandering Educators
- Wandering Justin
- Watching America
- What a Trip
- Whole Travel
- Wild Junket
- WordPress Planet
- World Hum
- World News
- World Reviewer
- World Weather
- Writing Horseback
From Elliot.org
Alaska TravelGram
Almost Fearless
Anders Meanders
Arthur Frommer
Brave New Traveler
Consumerist
Evan Sparks
Everett Potter
ExpertCruiser
Flight Wisdom
Gadling
Hidden Travel Gems
Hotel Blogs by Guillaume Thevenot
HotelChatter
Intelligent Travel
Jaunted
Jeanne Leblanc
LLWorldTour
Marriott on the Move
MaxaBlog
Online Travel Review
Peter Greenberg
PlaneBuzz
Rick Seaney
Roads Less Traveled
Safe Cruise
Ship Critic blog
Southwest Airlines
T2Impact
The BOOT
The Cruise Log
The Daily Traveler
The Practical Nomad
This Just In…..
Tim Leffel’s Cheapest Destinations
Towers and Tarmacs
Travel Babel
Travel Gear Blog
Travel Log
Travel Maven blog
Travel Post
Travel Rants
Traveler 2.0
Traveler’s Check
Tripinator – Travel 2.0
Tripso
Upgrade: travel better
USA Today’s Hotel Hotsheet
World Hum
WSJ.com: The Middle Seat Terminal
WordPress Publishing Problems with Flickr or other programs?
Another reminder (because I’ve needed this many times) that you must enable WordPresses “Remote Publishing” protocols if you want to blog photos directly from Flickr (a fantastic feature – I wish more people could do this but it remains a little tricky to set up both at Flickr and at WP unless you know this is needed (defaults have these boxes UNchecked). I think you only need the XML-RPC after correct configuration at Flickr, but do both so you have more ways to publish to your WP blog:
Remote Publishing
To post to WordPress from a desktop blogging client or remote website that uses the Atom Publishing Protocol or one of the XML-RPC publishing interfaces you must enable them below.
| Atom Publishing Protocol | |
|---|---|
| XML-RPC |
Climate Science Scandal – will Paleo Dendrochronology survive?
For new readers please NOTE that I am NOT a climate skeptic, I am just wondering why groupthink seems so pervasive in the climate science community, especially over at the key climate blog RealClimate .
Update: Two very thoughtful and balanced pieces written – by climate scientist Judy Curry – and by Peter Kelemen at Popular Mechanics .
Here’s the Wall Street Journal’s take on this.
Here are the infamous hacked emails.
There’s a remarkable development today on the climate front [thanks to Glenn for the link in the earlier post]. A huge amount of climate data, including some remarkable emails between scientists, have been hacked from the University of Anglia in England. These mails and data may shed some light on some of the more contentious points in climate science.
The odd methods and math seem especially conspicuous in tree ring studies of climate trends. Called Paleo Dendrochronology, these studies are VERY often used either alone or with other data in climate studies and often are used alone or with other data to make the case that global climate change is potentially catastrophic.
The best scientific work critical of global warming science seems to focus mostly on attacking this weakest link – or should I say the weakest rings – over at ClimateAudit.org.
Here is a great balanced view at UK Guardian of the story so far: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/nov/20/climate-sceptics-hackers-leaked-emails
A critical view of the implications of this data is here at ClimateAudit
A sympathetic view is here at RealClimate where I tried to post I posted this comment and I appreciate the good sportsmanship of them letting it through moderation. When they do allow me to post this type of comment I wonder if I’ve been too hard on them for what seems like censorship, but possibly could be the crappy posting system they have over there where moderation, timestamps, and other factors seem to confuse everybody.
Somebody naively wondered why there are so few comments on this post. IMO the answer is that RealClimate is effectively content-censored to a large degree for conformance with the prevailing ideas here.
Uninformed dissenters are sometimes let in so the comment crew can bash them around, but reasoned dissenters are usually banned outright. Many don’t bother trying to post here for that very reason.
Gavin in the interest of transparency would you at least roughly estimate how many of the comments have been moderated out for this post? I would guess 95% have been zapped.
<i>[RealClimate wrote] Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to a “a good way to deal with a problem” </i>
Could you give a few examples? I searched right here at Realclimate for uses of that term they tend to relate to “trickery”, not good science.
More climate updates: Here’s the Copenhagen Diagnosis, an excellent summary of the latest climate science since the last big IPCC report. For the record I do think this does suffer from the prevailing “somewhat alarmist” tone in some of the interpretations of the research. For example a key observation is the current pause in warming noted by satellite measures, and this is given short shrift here.
China shuts access to Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live, Hotmail, Blogger via the “Great Firewall” filters
China is closing down access to various internet services as they approach they anniversary of the Tiananmen Square democracy protests in 1989. The early report from TechCrunch says that Twitter, Flickr, Bing, Live, Hotmail, Blogger have all been made hard to access via the “Great Firewall” filters. I did notice when in China last year that there are various programs like ‘Great Ladder” that allow people to bypass these filters, but obviously not many are going to have the combination of nerve and savvy to do this.
I believe that China’s censorship policies are probably counterproductive *even to the Chinese Government’s goals* in the long term, and I’d sure like to find a way for the internet community to make this clear to China’s leaders. Ironically China’s leadership has done a remarkable job transitioning away from the bulky, centralized, bureaucratic economy that had been stifling progress for decades. China’s citizens now enjoy a higher level of prosperity and *economic* freedom than they arguably have ever had in history. Much of this prosperity is the result of producing goods for the US market. What exactly does the government think will happen if they allow more open dialog in China? I’d suggest they’ll find this would tend to reduce the tensions created by unhappy citizens rather than increase them. Suppression of dissent in Tibet routinely brings international scorn to China, where a more open dialog will bring praise, respect, and support.
China needs to realize that the world’s fascination and respect for China’s culture and international influence will be enhanced by free speech, not reduced.
TechCrunch UK is reporting on this and I’m looking for more direct information now.
More from China’s CN Reviews
Sue the bloggers!? [gulp]
Thanks to Paul for pointing us ot this interesting article about blogger liabilities. I’d be interested in how folks here view this topic. Do I need “blog comment insurance”?
Wall Street Journal on Blogger lawsuits
Bloggers are increasingly getting sued or threatened with legal action for everything from defamation to invasion of privacy to copyright infringement. In 2007 — the most recent data available — 106 civil lawsuits against bloggers and others in social networks and online forums were tallied by the Citizen Media Law Project at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, up from just 12 in 2003. There have been about $17.4 million in trial awards against bloggers to date, according to the Media Law Resource Center in New York, a nonprofit clearinghouse that tracks free-speech cases.
Google Social Search Wiki Launches
Today’s tech blogOsphere buzz is about Google’s new wiki search feature that allows users to rank their own results. This appears to me to be a splendid idea although I agree with some who say it won’t get used much.
However, for those who use this it may eventually allow a kind of search ranking we have never seen, where user defined preferences trump the mysterious algorithmic magic mistakes, gradually giving the user a great set of results well optimized to their needs.
I’d suggest that “perfect individualized search” may only require two basic steps – the first is a *discovery* part where you surface content relevant to your particular query and then plow through that manually to determine which sites best fit your needs. Google does a pretty good job of facilitating that right now. However a second piece would allow you to build on those “personally filtered” results in various ways – some as simple as just listing them in rough order of relevance to you as Google is now doing.
Is this a good Google idea? Yes! Will anybody much use this? Nope, because our habits as humans don’t incline us to be this organized. I had a great conversation a few days ago with the developer of Reuters Calais semantic search – a brilliant tool designed to surface relevancy and meaning from massive document archives. We were noting how difficult is is to simply break the habit of using Google search, even when it’s not the most appropriate tool for the job at hand.
Funny primates we !
Death rumors of blogosphere are greatly exaggerated
Nick Carr is usually insightful over at Rough Type, but he’s missed the point of blogging if he thinks the best of the medium is behind us. On the contrary I think the real promise of blogging – as well as the web in general – is yet to come.
Why are the rumors of the death of the blogosphere greatly exaggerated even while the medium is still improving? Because things are not happening in the structured way articulate and/or elite information folks often prefer.
Rather we see regular folks sharing their observations, sometimes in inspired ways but often just as part of a growing amateur and untuned symphony of insights. Although it is *certainly* true to note how much more crappy material there is out there than there was a few years ago before blogging went “mainstream”, it’s also true there is much more good material – it’s just become harder to find.
The good stuff is now distributed across such a large space and within massive comment streams that we need to build better blog search rather than a big blog mortuary.
I think folks like Nick are also correctly noting that the big blogs – thanks to big money – have become much worse because they now pander to large audiences with a lot of fluff pieces and filler. Often the original writers with unique and interesting voices are eclipsed at their own blogs by hired hacks who offer either quirky irrelevant views or inferior insights to the original. Part of the problem here is that writing has become commoditized at money blogs such that the spoils are reserved for the owners not the current writers. Ergo, formerly first class blog writing becomes…second class.
These speed bumps in my view will ultimately work themselves out and we’ll see the “real” voices (Nick Carr’s blog above is a great example) gradually gain more of a following at the expense of those who simply push out more information for the sake of a larger footprint. For me, blogs that have lost their appeal even as they gained in theoretical “valuations” were Searchblog by John Battelle and TechCrunch by Mike Arrington. Both remain “good” sources of information with “good” writing, but before these were *great* blogs with great new insider voices. I think this is the problem Nick and many others are worried about without justification. On TV you can only change the channel so many times before you are back at the same old junk. On the internet there are more channels than minutes in a lifetime.
Wales: Internet Collaboration Still in Infancy
Speaking in London Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales made an obvious but important observation: the collaborative aspect of the internet – what many would call a key aspect of “Web 2.0″, is still in its infancy.
Although Wales seemed to focus on video collaboration and how that could improve I’d suggest that the real power of the online medium will *not* be video – rather we’ll find that many different combinations of photos, videos, and community will evolve into the next key style of web interaction.
This could be along the lines of a more powerful and more ubiquitous Flickr, acting within loose alliances of connected niche sites connected by Facebook and Myspace and Google Social and Open ID.
The niche aspect of the internet is already clear in Politics, where you find blogs and commenters and social networkers sticking pretty close to home, preaching to their own choirs and repeating the same themes throughout loosely connected social networks dominated these days by either Obama supporters or Obama bashers (who generally are McCain supporters but almost never talk about McCain!).
Obviously there are many, many exceptions, but if you look at many of the most successful major blog efforts it is interesting how partisan they are and how uninterested they are in providing more than ideological fodder consistent with what their readers already think: DailyKOS, DrudgeReport, Huffington Post, WorldNewsDaily are a handful of commercially successful sites that add little to an informed discussion but remain more popular than the far more balanced views you’ll find elsewhere. It’s encouraging that CNN and other major news outlets are looking more to interactivity and blogging, though I predict they’ll find it very challenging to monetize these social media assets in the amounts to which they are accustomed. As with Yellow Page websites, I think major media blog sites may struggle with the difference between advertising costs and expectations online and off.
Sergey Brin is Blogging
Google co-founder Sergey Brin has just started a new blog which promises to offer some interesting insights into one of the most influential people in the technology world.
His first post details something incredibly personal – Brin’s predisposition to Parkinson’s Disease. He learned this from an examnation of his DNA by 23andMe, the company co-founded by Brin’s wife Anne.

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