So I'll just rant about it publicly right here. Because that makes far more sense.
The trend of the travel blogger en masse is definitely something to be addressed.
What is going on with the emergence of all these travel-pious, humourless, copycat travel blogs? Travel writing whose existence, beyond a bit of bragging and over optimisation within social media, is based around creation of webpages for the creation of ad revenue, for the creation of more trips for the creation of more ordinary blog posts for the creation of more ad revenue for the creation of more trips for the creation of more ordinary blog posts?
This is the circle of life for about 50 major travel blogs:
I don't blame anyone for making a nice living from this and unequivocal hats off to the ones who are open and honest about it. But many aren't. Business is business, I get that, if it works for them great. But so many of them come across as being so bloody independent from industry and impartial when in fact they pump out any old crap just to generate extra pages for ad revenue streams. Not to mention the fact that half of them are being tipped on the side by industry or the fact that I suspect most of them don't have the first clue about the type of information that is helpful to an average traveller. With that in mind, the smug and falsely impartial tone pisses me off. I think you'd typically find a better standard of information from a blog which is overtly belonging to a private enterprise, (like we see in SEO for example).
In travel I see a barrage of self-centred writing, (yes, I do see the hypocrisy of that statement given this is my self-serving blog, but let's ignore that), I see incestuous networks of sites and the masquerade of authoritative travel knowledge. They also spam the twitter streams to high heaven. Nothing for hours and then 6 fecking inane tweets in a row. I'd wager that for many (by no means all) this authority (read: traffic and ad revenue) is driven by a search long tail, and not so much to do with a site based on depth of travel experience, industry knowledge, travel consumer insight, quality writing or usefulness of content pumped out. Which again, is totally okay and we all know that, right?
We know the difference between internet marketers who take lots of holidays and useful sources on travel... right?
I don't suggest that the two things are mutually exclusive, but if you're fortunate enough to travel and want to publish online, I'm going to stick my neck out and say I want to see stuff that is:
1. entertaining, or
2. gives functional, genuinely useful advice, or
3. had an honest voice, but definitely does not
4. warble along randomly about what everyone else is missing out on in wherever you are whilst saying nothing meaningful but acting like you know it all when you don't because if you did you say something much more helpful and interesting than this, a travel diary isn't all that great for someone wanting to get started visiting that place and it isn't really an authority source on travel either you know.
There are many exceptions to the type of travel site I'm complaining about. Yet the fact that so there have been so many strong reactions in the debate started by Mike Barish at Gadling suggests there must be others who, over the past year or so, have started to feel a similar distaste for the unfounded know-it-all tone and smugness of some emerging travel bloggers.
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