This is a good time to investigate this Thing: I've just gotten back from one vacation and am gearing up to plan another. I suppose it would've been even better if I'd gotten to Thing 33 before that first vacation, but nothing's perfect.
For the travel blogs, I looked at Travel 2.0 Blog and Notes from the Road. I didn't get far into Travel 2.0 before getting distracted and heading off on a link to Nextstop.com. Testing it for Portland (my recent trip), I found a review for Cupcake Jones. The reviewer liked it much better than the friend I was visiting in Portland, who took me to Saint Cupcake instead, but at least it was a review of somewhere I'd heard of. As for Notes from the Road, it mostly served to remind me that I don't get out much: not only had I been to just one location on its homepage, I hadn't heard of most of the rest (Alvord Desert? Great Guana Cay?). Nice layout and design, though.
Moving on to the review sites, I decided on TripAdvisor. Obviously this is a site focused on hotels, rentals, food: the sorts of places you want to know about before you head off to an unknown city. Me, I tend to visit local friends who take me to the spots they know well. I ended up testing this on Bloomington, practically in my backyard. I found it interesting that when one person wrote a negative review of the Sofitel, the Sofitel posted a personalized response. Ah, the interactivity of Travel 2.0.
The travel journals are definitely more my style! I want to remember both VCarious and My Life of Travel for the next time I take a trip that's more about sightseeing than just hanging out with friends. I think it would have been great if sites like these had existed lo those many years ago when I did study abroad in Scotland. I see that MapVivo takes a different approach, that it would be suitable for a trip where you stopped at several different locations, like a tour of Europe or a road trip in the U.S.
Finally there were the travel mashups. I'm not going to have to travel to make use of Hotspotr, now that I finally have wireless devices. I plugged in my zip code and got to rediscover all the Starbucks in my neighborhood--all of them marked with cute little dollar signs, of course. Oddly, no one has mentioned the Caribou Coffees in my area. I was going to contribute a couple of cafes I know of, but I learned that Hotspotr wanted my name, at which point I became shy and ran away. Maybe later.
All this was fun, but I don't see our library making use of any of these sites. The only reason you'd come to a law library to ask about travel would probably be if you wanted to learn about the laws of your destination, and I'm guessing most people would ask their travel agent or just poke around online before coming to us.
