From the swivellin' chair...

Group emails. Most of us have received them at one time or another. I dread them.

People who are on a trip to some far-away place have this crazy notion that their life is infinitely more interesting than everyone else’s. Perhaps it is. Most of us would rate the life of someone who is travelling and experiencing new cultures, walking among ancient ruins, climbing the world’s tallest mountains and eating strange and exotic foods a tad more exciting to read about than the life of a someone working their way through the daily grind. No offence.

Unfortunately, countless group emails are predicated on the assumption that pretty much anything they include will be of vital interest to others. This is not a safe assumption to make. If you neglect your readers’ needs to be engaged and interested, chances are they will eventually grant your emails little more than a courtesy skim read. Or they might just stop reading them all together.

Group emails have migrated.
With the rise of blogging, group emails have migrated from email to the blogosphere. No surprises there. Starting your own blog gives you your own slice of the internet, where you can freely post photos, write about all your latest adventures and even throw in cool features like videos and travel maps. Blogs are also advantageous because they keep all your entries together, archived according to date, place and other tags.

But the move to blog-based group updates also means that your friends and family are going to have to put a bit of extra work into reading about your trip. If you’re blogging through Travellerspoint, they can subscribe to your blog by email, but the email only serves as a notification that you have posted something new in your blog. They will have to click on a link in the email that directs them to your blog. It might not sound like a lot of work, but it requires them to make a decision to put the time and effort into reading your latest entry. That puts extra pressure on you to present your update in a genuinly interesting and engaging way.

To help you deal with the pressure, I’ve come up with 3 tips that should help you keep your readers coming back, entry after entry, begging for more.

Tip # 1: Write quality introductions
Many people who make the transition from group emails to travel blog forget to change their writing style accordingly. Group emails sound like, well, emails. More often than not, they start with the customary Hey there, Hi ya’ll, Aloha, or any other variation of the greeting phrase you can imagine. When it comes to writing a blog, that’s probably not the best way to start. As I wrote last week, starting your entry with a bang will go a long way to catching your readers’ attention.

But let’s face it: a great introduction that isn’t followed up with interesting and engaging content is like dangling cake in front of a child’s face and then eating it in front of her. Don’t be a tease. Give the child her cake.

Tip # 2: Become a storyteller
Tell stories! Write about getting sick while hiking up Mount Kilimanjaro; write about breaking your leg while bicycling in South America; write about the exuberant French waiter in Paris; write about when you bungee jumped in New Zealand. Stories are fun to read and fun to remember. You’ll be thanking yourself for writing down your stories in 60 years’ time when you’re struggling to remember where you put your false teeth.

Tip # 3: Make use of photos, maps and videos
Even if your writing is great, too much text can frighten readers away. Break your entry up with photos, travel maps and videos to give your readers some variety and stamp your creativity all over your blog. Instead of writing about how beautiful the Pyrenees are, let your readers appreciate the beauty for themselves by adding photos. If your hotel room is disgusting, make a video of it and post that on your blog. And instead of starting your entry with an update of where you are and where you travelled from, include your Travellerspoint map at the top of the entry. Your readers will thank you!

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This is the second in a series about how to make your travel blog spectacular (check out last week’s post about writing quality introductions). If you found this entry helpful, you can keep updated by subscribing to the Swivellin’ Chair.

Here's a bit of light-hearted entertainment.

Whenever a Travellerspoint member reports something on the site as spam, it doesn’t take long before one of us lucky guys on the TP payroll gets the task of playing detective, sheriff and judge all at once. It’s fun in a power-crazy kind of way, and it keeps Travellerspoint clean from those peculiar people known as spammers. Yesterday though, I got a spam report that was a little out of the ordinary...

spammer has reported the following message from spammer as spam.

Subject: Re: can you help in desert of morocco
From: spammer
To: spammer

Message:

hello,
how are you ??
i'm very happy to send you this message if you interesting or you need some informations about morocco.
i'm [name witheld] from desert of morocco, southesat of morocco, i try to ogranise small trips by 4x4 or camels to visit and descovre all derictions of morocco , exactly desert like sand , gravures , oasis .....
and i try to help our tourisms i desert if they have some problem.
too, i organize bivouac to spend nieghts winder tents and descouvre all traditions of nomads.
i hope that my typical organize is interesting you , can you contact me in [phone number]

Ok, so lets work out exactly what's going on here... First of all, spammer (not his real username) sent a message to himself. Then, in a sudden rush of honesty/foolishness, he reported his own message as spam!

That’s funny enough, but I really had to laugh when I read the actual message. I was especially fond of this bit:

i try to help our tourism i desert if they have some problem.

Priceless.

Eric

p.s. If you enjoyed this post, it'd be cool if you took a minute to Digg it!

I’ll confess: sometimes I find it hard to do my job.

You see, the Travellerspoint Overlords have assigned me the task of finding the cream of the daily crop of Travellerspoint members’ blogs. Easy task, right? Not always.

Out of the 50+ blog entries written every day, I’d estimate about half are not aimed at general readership. Quite a few appear to be aimed squarely at loyal family and friends desperate for the latest news from their loved one. Fair enough - but it doesn’t make for particularly engaging reading for those who don’t know the blogger.

Out of the other half, there are usually a couple spammy blogs, a handful of “testing, testing” blogs and a dozen blogs that are not written in English. That usually leaves about 10 blogs that are in English and geared to a wider audience.

How do I pick one to be featured on the main blogs page? Glad you asked

Inspired by a couple posts about writing great travel blogs on Brave New Traveler, I thought I’d apply the concept to Travellerspoint. While there’s quite a few things to think about when writing your blog for a wider audience, today I’m going to focus on one aspect that will instantly pique my interest (and hopefully other readers’) in your blog: a quality introduction.

Why should I care?
There are a few reasons why a quality introduction is particularly important on Travellerspoint:

• After you post a new entry, your blog will be listed for a while among the most recently updated blogs on the main blogs page. Besides the title, people will be able to read the first couple lines or (if you wrote one) the subtitle.
  
• Similarly, if people are subscribed to the RSS or Atom feeds of your blog or the main blogs page, they will be able to read the title and first few lines of your entries.
  
• If you write a really great entry, I may decide to feature it on the Travellerspoint front page and the main blogs page. To feature it, I select a sizeable chunk of your introduction that I think will make other Travellerspoint members want to read your blog. If your introduction isn’t all that interesting, there’s a good chance your entry won’t get featured.

Is that enough inspiration to really care about your introductions? I hope so! I have 2 suggestions for ways you can spice up your introductions.

Tell your story
In my experience, the most successful introductions are the ones that launch straight into a story. They don’t waste a paragraph on explaining where the blogger is, where they travelled from, or which hostel they’re staying in. If it’s important to explain those things, do it briefly or try slotting it in a little further down, when your readers are already entranced by your fine prose. Take, for example, this excerpt from brynster’s blog:

"Sandro, I can´t climb trees!"

That was Julia, the extremely pleasant but more than slightly nervous British tourist who had accompanied her husband and son as well as Geoff and I on a hike through Madidi National Park.

Sandro was our amazing guide, whose indigenous community has lived in the park for 500 years and now owns and wholly operates Chalalan Ecolodge, a jungle lodge located five hours up two tributaries of the Amazon River.
And the concern over climbing trees was voiced because we were being approached by a herd of 150 white-lipped peccaries, sharp-toothed wild pigs prone to unsettling grunting and clacking noises - and of a more immediate concern, the same type of wild pigs that once ate an unlucky hunter from Sandro´s village.

Danger. Suspense. Maybe it’s because I’m a boy who grew up watching too many movies of the Die Hard - Lethal Weapon variety, but a start like this is bound to suck me in. It also made for an ideal introduction to use for the front page when I featured the entry. True, there was actually a one-line intro before this, but I didn't mind that too much because it was short (that said, I think the post could have been stronger without it).

Evocative descriptions and funny observations
Evocative descriptions are engaging because they invite the reader to imagine the place you’re describing - and if there’s one thing people on Travellerspoint enjoy doing, it’s imagining foreign places! Comical observations work in the same way, although they don’t tend to be quite as descriptive. Humour makes up for it:

Trains and toilets: two things that have struck me as very different from what we are used to. Although I could lengthen that list to include: people cycling on pavements (which drives me nuts), the post service redelivering things on request at helpful times such as 7pm-9pm and obsessive rubbish sorting to name a few!

But for today I will just stick to the subjects of trains and toilets.

Toilets here range from the most basic squat toilet (I'll spare you the details) to the rolls-royses of toilets! The more sophisticated kind include heated seats, emergency-call buttons and a whole range of buttons that, judging from the pictures, will pump water or blow air just about any place you can imagine.. and then some. I haven't had the guts to experiment with these.

Ah, good old toilet humour, courtesy of Matt and Meli's blog!

Once you’ve fashioned the world’s finest introduction, you can start thinking about how to develop the rest of your content. We won’t go there today, but watch this space for more articles about how to craft your travel blog into the most engaging and interesting blog it can be. If you want to be updated by email or XML, feel free to subscribe.

News overnight that the Cutty Sark, a 137-year-old tea clipper, one of London's popular tourist attractions, had gone up in flames shocked many. After looking at the charred remains of that once beautiful ship, it was hard to imagine this icon being worth restoring. Therefore I was surprised this morning to see this quote from Chris Livett, the chairman of Cutty Sark Enterprises:

It will be the old ship. We are absolutely devoted to the ship and will be progressing with her conservation.

We are determined to put it back together.

I wonder though, what really is the value in restoring such historic treasures when I can only imagine it will end up being little more than a replica.

Another great example of this is the Mostar Bridge in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Destroyed during the Balkan war, it was entirely reconstructed and was reopened in 2004.

There are countless other examples through the ages. The Cutty Sark seems destined to be added to that list.

via The Herald