I've mentioned a few times that it would be great to have some kind of travel blog directory. There are a lot of blog directories out there that have sections for travel, but I'm talking about a one stop shop for great travel blogs. I'm excited because two other travel bloggers are attempting to do just that.
Earlier this year, Timen from in my All Stars started up the Trusted Travel Blog Network, a list of blogs that are nominated by bloggers or readers and reviewed by an independent panel. Although his travels in Vietnam have put some of his plans on hold for now, Timen has some great ideas for the network.
In September, Eric at From the swivellin' chair became an editor at Travel Blogs.com, a site that "brings the internet's best narrative travel blogs together into one place." The site includes travel stories taken from featured blogs as well as interviews with the bloggers themselves. This is a great resource for finding those "round the world" or "on the road" stories.
I still visit the travel sections of other blog directories when I'm looking for new blogs to read, but one downside is the number of out-of-date or spam type blogs that are listed. Some directories, like Blog Top Sites and Top Blog Area, avoid this by ranking blogs according to the number of visitors they receive. The blogs at the top are more current and tend to be more popular. By going down the list, though, you can find good blogs that aren't as well known.
Another idea is to visit Technorati and do an advanced search for travel blogs. You can do that by searching for keywords in posts, or certain categories in posts or the blog directory.
Of course, one of the best ways to find a good blog is to follow recommendations from other bloggers. That is another reason why I'm excited about the Trusted Travel Network and Travel Blogs.com.
Thursday, October 4, 2007
How to Find Good Travel Blogs
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12 comments:
Great tip about TravelBlogs.com, Stacy. I'm always searching for other bloggers to link to from my posts depending on my topic du jour.
Like you, I keep hitting out of date blogs (especially in my series on New Orleans).
I did contact Timen a few months ago and he said it would take awhile for the next round of blog selections. So thanks for the update about his trip.
It's definitely important to have reliable resources. Especially with all the spam and faux-travel blogs out there. My only problem with ranking sites is that for people like me who aren't (yet) high rankers, it's harder to get proper exposure. The rich keep getting richer as it were.
Thanks for your insight on this topic though. You always seem to have your finger on the pulse.
Thank you for the comments, Travel Betty. I like to find blogs that aren't as well known, and that takes a little more work. I think the best thing for new bloggers to do is write good content and leave comments on other blogs. You are doing that already, so I guess it's a matter of being patient.
I've found del.icio.us to be a reasonable way to find weblogs. I track the travel tags in an rss browser, and every so often a good article appears, which leads me to the weblog behind it.
Mind you, there's an awful lot of hotel-finder and cheap-flights websites to wade through first ;)
Hi Paul, Thank you for the tip! Using the RSS feed makes it easy to skim through the not so great sites and find good travel sites.
Thanks for sharing these excellent resources!
You are welcome, Beth!
A very good blog. I like traveling and recently I purchased a traveling package to an adventure park from Orbitz store at Couponalbum.com, this is great..!!
It's so great that I just found this because I was looking for travel blogs to link up with. :)
You are my hero!
Stephanie
http://www.makethegreatescape.org/
I'm glad I could help, Stephanie. I hope you found some blogs that interest you.
You need to dig through a lot of stuff to find the good ones. I'm hesitating to mention this one:
http://www.guidebook.se
mostly because I write it myself. Currently, it's mostly about hotels. Why not check it out and see for yourself?
All the best,
:: hakan ::
Stacy,
Is Trusted Travel Blogs still active? There are some good blogs on that network, but no e-mails work.
TTB isn't active at this time. Timen was going to start it up again, but I haven't heard anything recently.
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