Looking forward to the heat, food and culture - and writing about it all

Want to follow my next travels (July & August 2019) here are your choices.

• My travel stories blog www.kiwitravelwriter.wordpress.com  ) sign-up to get an email when I publish a blog
• Travel photos as I go  https://www.instagram.com/kiwitravelwriter/
• Regular updates about my travels https://www.facebook.com/TheTravellingWriter/

travelblather - read this and see why I love it! Always good stuff:)

April 23, 2009

Blogging for travel writers - Why bother?

I had an interesting evening at the British Guild of Travel Writers monthly get together last night. I was speaking with Alastair McKenzie and Simon Ward Wanderlust's web editor about all things web 2.0.

We were preaching to a quite sceptical audience. And I can see why. There remains little money to be made for pro travel writers in writing for web... and next to nothing from blogging or tweeting.

So why bother?

Well, one thing we all agreed on was that it's getting ever harder to make a proper living writing about travel and the net is very much to blame. Falling ad revenues for print media are directly related to reduced reader numbers - because people are reading stuff on-line for free and not bothering to buy magazines and newspapers in the ways they would have done before the net existed. The future looks pretty bleak for old school freelance travel writers.

Some key points I tried to make about why being part of the on-line world matters (and I hope I succeeded) read the rest here

Thanks Jeremy, you certainly did succeed, and I concur: hence my presence as a bloggerand twitterer!

blogging 101 and check out my other one

Blogging 101   Friday, 13 February 2009 11:40 by Writer's Relief Staff

The term “blog” is a derivative of “Weblog,” a phrase coined by Jorn Barger to describe his online journal, Robot Wisdom. A “blogger” is the person behind the blog—a collection of online journal entries. And the “blogosphere” is the community of blogging sites as a whole. Got it? Here’s some history.

Back in 1995 FrontPage was released by Vermeer Technologies. It was one of the first Web publishing tools, and it was designed to allow ordinary people (those without coding skills) to publish their own Web sites. Two years later Ritual Entertainment hired Steve Gibson to write journal entries online full-time, making him one of the first professional bloggers. And today there are too many blogging sites to document.

Weblogs originally were defined by one single characteristic: the site had to contain a series of dated entries. From there Weblogs differed in scope and content, style and tone, but they all contained individual commentaries, personal thoughts, and links to related sites. A blog may contain videos, photos, sketches, even music. Read one person’s journal-type blog over a period of a year, for example, and you get a pretty good idea about what it’s like to walk in that person’s shoes for a while. It’s socially appropriate voyeurism.

NOTE

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