Advice for Travelers:
Using the Internet to Share Your Adventure
During Your Adventure
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disclaimer
Women travelers, or motorcycle travelers, or whatever kind of travelers: there are a number of reasons to share information online during your travels:
But a word of caution: don't take so much time up sharing your photos and stories during your trip that you are taking time away from seeing sights, meeting people and enjoying the moment. I see far too many people taking hours out of their day to blog, share photos and follow Twitter, and thereby missing out on even more incredible experiences while traveling. Keep it simple. Just a little information goes a long way! Photos There is no better photo-sharing site than Flickr. IMO, it is unequaled. And you can set your account up such that you can decide how much you want to share: with anyone, or just family and friends? Do you want to tag your photos, so that they can be more easily found by anyone and reach an even larger audience? It's up to you! Sharing photos on Flickr is far superior to Facebook, because, believe it or not, not everyone is on Facebook. In addition, Facebook is hot today - the way MySpace used to be, the way AOL used to be. You can't count on it always being the site. Share your photos on Flickr instead of Facebook, and then link to such via Facebook or whatever social media platform you prefer. You do not have to share everything while on a trip; just pick 1 - 5 photos to share each day, or every other day - even once a week, depending on how long you are traveling. Upload the rest of your photos after your trip, or on a "down" day on your trip of many months. Here are just a FEW of my photos:
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You can create a blog or web site only for your travels, or a section of a web site you already have. Your blog or web site is the central space where all other online activities during your travels lead to and from. It's where you put all the links to whatever you are doing online on Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, whatever. And you can put links to it from photo descriptions or Facebook updates, so people can find more detailed information about you and your travels.
You don't have to write long essays/blogs; what's most important is that this blog or web site is updated frequently. And the good news is that you can easily create gateways so that anything you Tweet gets posted to your blog or web site, or so that every time you post a new blog, a Facebook status update gets generated automatically. More on that later.
Pace yourself if you want to blog every day or every week, such that it doesn't take too much time away from your travels, from seeing and experiencing the trip.
I love Twitter because:
Good things to manually-tweet to your followers:
If a company messes up your travel - an airline loses your luggage, a hotel doesn't respond to a complaint, a tourist site doesn't provide good customer service - Tweet about it, and if the company has a Twitter account, mention it in your Tweet. Don't be surprised if you get contacted by the company, offering to make amends!
You can set up a gateway via Twitterfeed so that when you update your blog, a tweet is automatically sent out to your Twitter followers.
You can also set up a gateway so that anything you post to Twitter automatically gets posted to your web site. You can see an example of that right here on the page you are reading now, per my own Twitter account (on the right). You can also set up a gateway so that your Tweets go automatically to your Facebook account as well. Just look on the help menu on Twitter for how to do this.
Facebook or GooglePlus
These are basically the same thing, the only difference being that one (Facebook) has WAY more users than the other (GooglePlus). It's fine to use either of these platforms, but do not make either the central place to find information about you while you are traveling, or the primary place to share photos, for the reasons noted earlier on this page.
Use Twitterfeed or whatever tools each of these sites provide to gateway your Tweets to Facebook or GooglePlus, so you don't have to worry about logging in and updating info here - one update will take care of all sites you use.
Don't create a gateway where everything you post to Facebook or GooglePlus gets posted to Twitter. Why? Because Twitter allows only 140 characters per message; whatever you gateway from Facebook or GooglePlus will get truncated when it gets posted to Twitter, and may not make any sense to readers.
Remember
Again: don't take so much time up sharing your photos and stories during your trip that you are taking time away from seeing sights, meeting people and enjoying the moment. I see far too many people taking hours out of their day to blog, share photos and follow Twitter, and thereby missing out on even more incredible experiences while traveling. Keep it simple. Just a little information goes a long way!
Also see:
Accessing
essential information while traveling
Advice on things you should do before you leave on a trip, to ensure you
can access information via any computer or your feature phone or smart
phone that you might need while traveling
Disclaimer
Any activity incurs risk. The author assumes no responsibility for the use
of information contained within this document.
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| Disclaimer: Any
activity incurs risk. The author assumes no responsibility for
the use of information contained within this document. This material is provided as is, with no expressed or implied warranty. Permission is granted to copy, present and/or distribute a limited amount of material from my web site without charge if the information is kept intact and is credited to Jayne Cravens. Please contact me for permission to reprint, present or distribute these materials (for instance, in a class or book or online event for which you intend to charge). by Jayne Cravens, all rights reserved (unless noted otherwise, or the art comes from a link to another web site). |
