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"There is very little mystery left in driving around America when you can search a million photos of the Grand Canyon online, or when you hew rigidly to the route laid out by the automated Google Maps voice as you roll through the desert. You can travel anywhere you want before you actually go there....
"It used to be that you would hardly ever see anyone you met ever again. With the advent of email, the half-life of a friendship was about a year. Keeping up with mail tended to fall off at that rate, but with Facebook it lasts forever. There is a dark side, however. Over the last...
Many of my best travel experiences have come about through recommendations from friends. The Taiwanese guy who took me to a stylish lounge bar in Taipei with the hidden entrance; the Australian expat who showed me his favorite ramen restaurant in Tokyo; and the list goes on. Thanks to the Internet , old-fashioned word-of-mouth is...
Social networks have made a dramatic impact on travel. During my first backpacking trip in 2004, I relied on e-mail addresses to stay in touch with the new friends I was making. I once met a girl in Paris. Later into my trip, I was shocked to run into her at my hostel in Edinburgh....
In my last couple of blog posts, I waxed poetic about the life of a digital nomad. As a counterpoint, here's a fine article that appeared in the Orange-County Register : Digital detox for a trip to Italy . Gary Warner, the newspaper's travel editor, decided to cut off the electronic umbilical cord for an...
Twitter stands out. Photo: Rosaura Ochoa / Flickr Creative Commons A while back, Twitter re-designed their user interface. What escaped most attention was how they also beefed up their search capability. The social media blog Mashable.com did a brief write-up about this function: How to use Twitter's advanced search . More importantly, they produced a...
It's not like anyone who's on a long-term or RTW trip has to have a travel blog - after all, plenty of people blazed the vagabond trail long before computers were even a thing. But these days it's hard to find a RTW traveler who doesn't have some method set up for keeping track of...
"For the past three decades, travel -- especially when it gets written down -- often has at its center a defining solipsism: the Self in search of itself in strange places promising to cast a different and edifying light on the Quest. In an era of self-absorption and self-gratification -- Facebook and Twitter may be...
Nick Baker, the Internet Cafe Hobo, will be traveling around the world and visiting Internet cafes. The details are in this BBC World Service article . Although Internet cafes may be facing a decline with the rise of netbooks like the Eee PC, they are still a common pit stop on the travelers' trail. Especially...
Online social networking has revolutionized the way people communicate via the internet. Even travelers can benefit from this by using Facebook , one of the leading social networking sites out there. Here are some ways you can use Facebook as part of your travel experience: Find people who have been to your destination. One thing...
Okay. So I know I go on and on about the power of social networking sites to connect travelers from around the world. What can I say? I really see them as a game-changer. This week, there's more anecdotal evidence to support my case. First up: An interesting post over at the great quit-your-job-and-travel-the-world blog,...