Twenty years ago the hostels of Kathmandu and beach bars of Ko Samui were full of young backpackers scrawling notes in well-thumbed diaries. When they felt the need to communicate with home – perhaps to ask dad to wire some money – they would take a bus to the nearest poste restante office.

Then in the 1990s thousands of travellers put aside their journals and stopped writing letters. With internet cafes appearing on every street corner from Bombay to Bangkok, they signed up for Hotmail accounts and started emailing friends and family with news of their latest adventures.

Now, in the 21st century, many backpackers have little time for email. Instead, they blog, uploading messages, photos, movie clips and podcasts to their personal online journals. One of the advantages of blogging over emailing is that you can create a document to keep and revisit in future years. It also allows you to contact fellow travellers and share tips, flick through each others’ photo albums and perhaps even arrange to meet in real life.

More than a dozen travel community websites have sprung up over the past decade – many of them hoping to become the MySpace or FriendsReunited of travel. Which are worth a visit? First, let’s identify the different types of travel community sites.

Blogging sites

If you want to share your travel diaries and photographs with friends and family – and a bunch of strangers – you can join a blogging site. Once you sign up, you can skim through other members’ diaries and, if you like the look of them, make contact. Examples include Globenotes.com, Travelblog.com, RealTravel.com, Mytripjournal.com and Travelpod.com.

Networking sites

The latest generation of travel community sites take their cue from MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. Travel tips and diaries take second place to the primary business of social networking. At sites like Wayn.com and Gusto.com you can browse through galleries of members’ photos, learn about their favourite places, send them messages and “make friends” with them – all without leaving the comfort of your desk. If it’s real-life encounters you want, try sites such as Couchsurfing.com, where you can find people to put you up for the night, and Virtualtourist.com, which claims to have close to 900,000 members and arranges regular meetings around the world.

Peer review sites

It is said that 10% of people planning a trip consult TripAdvisor, the most successful travel review site on the web. It claims to have more than 5million write-ups of hotels, restaurants, attractions and resorts, all given ratings out of 5. Tripadvisor and rivals including Priceline.co.uk are not for bloggers, but they do allow you to let off steam. And if used judiciously, they are useful research tools.

The lines get blurred

The lines between these three types of sites are becoming increasingly blurred as review sites and blogging sites dip their toes into the world of social networking. TripAdvisor, for instance, now allows users to pen their own personal profiles and upload videos. Some sites – including Travbuddy.com and Tripconnect.com – now straddle the line between blogging and social networking. They allow you to upload your travel diaries and photos while collecting new online “friends”.

You may be itching to publish your travel journals, but before you do, there are a few things to consider. Firstly, if your main interest is in blogging about your trips and uploading photos or videos, you will want to be confident that your material is safe. With so many rival blogging sites fighting for critical mass, there is a danger that some will go out of business, taking your material with them.

Another risk is that they might introduce annual fees. One site has already done this: Mytripjournal.com gives you a free 45-day trial - just enough time to get you hooked - then it hits you for £47 a year. Privacy may also be an issue. Some sites allow you to protect your material from the prying eyes of all and sundry. Others do not. Travelpod.com looks attractive because it lets you upload unlimited quantities of photos, videos and podcasts, but if you later decide you want these password-protected, you’ll pay a £20 annual fee.

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Wayn.com

The main problem with travel networking sites is that none has achieved critical mass – there simply aren’t enough people using them. But UK-based Wayn.com (it stands for Where Are You Now?) looks like it might break out. With big-name investors behind it, including Brent Hoberman of Lastminute.com, Wayn now claims 8million members worldwide. It looks slick. The only drawback is that to access all the features – including chat forums and instant messenger – you must pay an annual fee.

Boo.com

Once upon a time, Boo.com sold designer trainers. A victim of the dot-com crash, it’s now back selling holidays. The site looks good with a clever mix of user reviews, maps and direct hotel booking. But look beneath the bonnet and it lacks real vroom. Because it draws its user content from low-budget travel sites that the company owns, including Hostels.com and Trav.com, its coverage of midmarket and upmarket hotels is thin, or non-existent.

Gusto.com

With its combination of travel blogs, reviews, user photos and social bookmarks, Gusto looks promising. But much of the content is trite or irrelevant. We found blatant advertisements posing as reviews and tedious diary entries (“I’m taking my son Jordan to St. Louis today to tryout for a spot on the 2007 Missouri Statewars roller hockey team.”) Looking for hotel reviews in Amsterdam, we found just one hotel, reviewed once. Most members appear to be American.

Tripup.com

Another social networking site, Tripup.com is not packed with scintillating reviews, but it does have some neat features including Locate-a-Mate – you enter the dates and destinations of your next trip and it shows you which members live there, or will be there at the same time. In June this year, for instance, 32 members say they will be in Barcelona. Because members are asked a string of personal questions – such as which celebrity they’d like to sit next to on their next flight – it’s fairly easy to see who you’re likely to get on with. You might, for instance, take a shine to John, 32, who lives in New York and boasts that he “can say F#@%K in 30 different languages”. Or not.

Tripadvisor.co.uk

The world’s most successful travel review site now has a UK domain. Although open to abuse – both from hotel staff posting positive reviews and from vindictive guests or rival hoteliers posting bad ones – TripAdvisor now has such a wealth of content that the genuinely good places rise to the top and the dross sinks out of sight. As a rule, the more reviews a hotel has, the more reliable the ratings. However, don’t use the site to book – it only compares a small selection of companies, some of which are part of Expedia, which owns TripAdvisor.

Realtravel.com

If you like to meticulously plan and record your journeys, Realtravel.com provides an attractive and free place to do it. Once you start writing about your trip, the route is automatically plotted on a map. and you can easily upload photographs to scatter through the text. Other members can then leave comments or ask you questions. It’s not the most innovative website in the world, but it does the job. More suited to silver surfers than high school students, perhaps.

Tripconnect.com

Combining blogging and social networking, Tripconnect has some useful features including user-generated groups. These allow you to sift through the members to find only those interested in, say, kitesurfing, or military history. You can also research a destination by seeing all the other people who’ve been there – pick someone you like the look of, and you can read their personal guide, or ask them questions about the place.

information from : travel.timesonline.co.uk

This entry was posted on Thursday, June 7th, 2007 at 3:56 am and is filed under Travel. Tags: America Amsterdam Bangkok Barcelona Best Travel Century Community Expedia Hotels Internet cafe internet cafes Kathmandu Missouri New York Packer Resort restaurant Samui search tools St. Louis Travel travel community travel site travel tips travel websites TripAdvisor . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.