Reading habits for better travel blogging
A shelf of books. Photo: Ian Wilson / Flickr
Without exception, every traveler I’ve met has been an avid reader. Makes sense, as a keener interest in information and stories complement a curiosity to see the world. The natural next step is to pick up our keyboards and write stories of our own, in travel blogs.
The website Travelllll.com had a post titled, Good Travel Blogging: Seven Ways to Read Better. There is a good mix of advice. The writer recommends where to find good articles for inspiration, how to read with a critical eye, and more.
My favorite is tip No. 1: Read #longform. Following @longreads on Twitter has been a revelation. The articles there are found through a crowdsourcing process. Fellow reading addicts submit their favorite stories by marking them with the hashtag #longreads. Then the main editor tweets out his selections from @longreads. I’d recommend following both the Twitter account and the hashtag so you don’t miss a story.
Taking that step further, an awesome website for long-form journalism is Byliner. It’s a social network where people can find and share the best reads on the Internet. The site is so addictive for inveterate readers that it should come with a warning.
What do you read to inspire your blogging? Please share your advice in the comments.
October 30th, 2011 at 3:52 pm
Oh My God ! Discussing books & reading always makes me feel so GUILTY and INADEQUATE, because I must confess that I have not read a real book in approximatively 1 year ! Shame on me ! I must explain, however, that I do not engage in travel blogging, thus I do not habitually need inspiration from books for my personal blogs where I mostly write about myself, thus having an unending source of pleasurable inspiration to last me even more time than I actually hope to maintain my current blogs ! These days I mostly rely on wikipedia to read stuff anyway, plus I indulge from time to time in some real paper issues of Vanity Fair, Monocle, and Reader’s Digest ! But I have been a long-term fan of reading travel books or fiction, mostly crime novels, set in yet exotic or occasionally tempting for me locales of the world…this all until I moved to Norway 1 year ago and this period in my life has certainly provided me with both time and the compulsive guilty need for a LOT of self-examination, at the same time offering me enough real-life derealisation type escapist exposures to the degree that I have been feeling no book is or will ever be adequate enough ever again to transport me to the totally exciting heights of thrill and depths of anxiety coupled with endless puzzled “whodonit’s” and and “I can’t believe this is really happening !” that I have been faced with in real life right here in this past year ! Yet I long to hold a book in my hands again, and I confess I coveteously looked at the photo from the top of this post, then guiltily glanced at the yet unexplored but prudently filled ahead of time book shelves from my current apartment ! Maybe this post will give me the necessary “kick in the pants” to actually go and try to take one of them to bed with me tonight !