Most vagabonds are no strangers to long trips and living frugally on the road to make that carefully hoarded cash last as long as possible.

But there’s also a new breed of traveler, not exactly vagabonds in the traditional sense, whose existence is almost entirely enabled by the internet. Terms vary, but the one that I keep running across is “location independent,” more or less a fancy way of saying your job is inside your laptop and can go wherever you do.

It’s an entirely different approach to traveling than the traditional work-save-travel cycle that many of us have been practicing for years.

Thanks to books like Tim Ferriss’ The Four Hour Work Week and the online culture that’s grown up around it, becoming “location independent” seems to be the new holy grail for many travelers.

If you happen to be a bit older you might recall a similar fascination sprung up around Douglas Coupland’s book Generation X which coined the term “McJobs” for the throwaway jobs committed nomads often hold between stints on the road.

The successors to Coupland’s idea have gone a bit further though, many of today’s nomads are working on full time careers with jobs that are anything but throwaways. And the list of jobs you can do online from anywhere in the world continues to grow every day.

But who’s really part this go-anywhere, online workforce? that’s exactly what Corbett Barr over at Free Pursuits and Lea and Jonathan Woodward of Location Independent are trying to discover with the “location independent and digital nomad survey.”

If you’re currently working from the road, or even if you simply aspire to one day sever your ties to any specific geography, head on over and take the survey (don’t worry, it won’t take more than a few minutes). Barr is hoping that the results will help digital nomads “better understand the community and to find out how we can better help each other.”

The other goals is to help answer some of the FAQs about how one becomes location independent and what the lifestyle is like — practical questions, like how much do you need to work, where is the best place to live cheaply and so on.

And when the survey is done we’ll let you know all about the results.

[Photo credit: *Micky, Flickr]