"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....

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...

"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...

Some of the original vagabonders were captains at sea who dared to sail between the shipping lanes, tacking between storms and Men-o-War. Rebelling against dependency and striking out on your own was a pirate's reason for living. Perhaps their methods were suspect, but we can admire their decision to forsake the familiar shackles of society...

Have you ever considered travel to Antarctica? By bus? OK, maybe not the bus part, but you have to admit that it would certainly be an adventure. Andrew Evans, contributing editor for National Geographic Traveler , just boarded a bus on New Year’s Day in Washington, D.C.—headed for the frozen continent. His bus trips will...

By now, I'm sure everyone has heard of Twitter , the social networking micoblogging site/iPhone app/time suck that purports to connect you to your friends and your cabal to the rest of the world through succinct 140-character statements on what you had for breakfast. I remember back when Twitter was first around and everyone was...

Recent weeks have seen me travel out to Bermuda for World Hum , across Kansas for The Believer , and off to Russia for Afar ; articles about these experiences will debut in coming months. Here's what else has been going on for me in the travel-publishing world: My Italian publisher, Ponte alle Grazie ,...

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,...