Sharing Your Experiences on the Internet

Technology can be a fabulous tool and with it many wonderful things can be created and shared. When it comes to travelers, they, too, can use it in many different ways. One unique way to utilize technolgy is to use it to share your trip - live - with others. By live I mean people can follow along with your journey as it unfolds. In this way your audience has the opportunity to become a part of your adventure as opposed to just a detached reader. To what degree this happens depends on what method you use to communicate and how well you communicate. This page will describe different ways to communicate and gives some tips on effective communication via the World Wide Web (WWW).

There are a variety of useful formats you can use to share your trip with others including:

• photographs
• written accounts
• oral narrations
• video
• any combination of these

In addition to this, there are different ways of exhibiting them - some simple and some more complex, each highlighting them in a different manner.

Photos

Exhibiting your photos is probably the single best way to share your experiences with others, after all a picture is worth a thousand words (a good picture that is). Below are some web sites where you can put your pictures and share them with the world. Most offer free limited services but charge for expanded services. Please, read the fine print! You could be merrily displaying photos from your trip when all of a sudden you recieve an email message informing you to either start paying or you can't add any more pictures. I can't list all the sites that offer a place to share your photos with others nor can I list the services they provide since there are so many of them and the services they offer frequently change. You need to research the one that will fit your needs the best. Here is a partial list of sites that may be of interest to you:

• Facebook: This is a very popular social site. It's great since, in addition to posting your pictures, you can include a simple blog and interact with others. Currently (August 2009) they don't allow videos.
• MySpace: Another very popular social site where you can include pictures, a simple blog, and videos.
• Flickr: This is the premier picture posting site, especially if you want to showcase your photos. The site has a lot of limitations unless you upgrade to a pro account (for a fee, of course). As of June, 2009 here are the limitations of a free account: There's no limit to the number of photos you can have but you'll only see the most recent 200 photos displayed and you can only upload 100MB per month. Only when you upgrade will all the photos be available to you. They also compress or resize your photos (you lose a lot of quality) and you lose access to the original. You can regain access to all your originals by, you guessed it, upgrading to a pro account.
• Crazy Guy On A Bike: This a a great site by Neil Gunton that doesn't charge you anything, but relies on donations. We used it for our first trip and I really liked it. It's very easy to use and you can include as much writing, photos, and links to videos as you wish. It is only for bicycle tourists but I've heard the site will expand to include backpackers and many other travelers. Be careful - this site compresses your photos significantly.

Online Diaries (Blogging)

Recently blogging has become phenomenally popular. I personally don't see why since it's essentially writing about anything you want to write about and posting it for all to see. You could always do this, but I guess not as easily as you can now because of all the easy-to-use blogging software available. This is, I think, probably the simplest way to share your adventures with anyone who has access to the internet. It's easy, it's fast, it doesn't require a fast connection, and best of all you can include pictures and videos. Here are some popular sites where you can post your blogs:

• Blogger: Blogger is a free blog publishing tool from Google for easily sharing your blog.
• WordPress: Another very popular site for sharing your blog.
• BloggerTalk and BloggerHub are others you may be interested in.

Video

Videos have become mainstream on the web due to a lot of factors including faster internet speeds and the proliferation of camcorders on cell phones and digital still cameras. The sites that host videos for free are many. A Google search for such sites will come up with many possibilities. Just as with sites that host your photos - read the fine print. They will all have some limitations. If they didn't, their servers would be overwhelmed by too many videos. Here are some popular sites where you can post your videos:

• YouTube: This is by far the most popular video hosting site. It's great for short videos where quality is not a concern. Your videos get more exposure to others here than anywhere else. They have two limitations: no more than 10 minutes per video and the video file can be no larger than 100 MB. Although they say they support true wide screen format (14:9), they don't - they just fill the gap with black.
• Vimeo: This is my main hosting site for videos. I changed over from YouTube because they support true wide screen format. They also have some neat widgets, check this one out on my home page. Vimeo has the limitation that you can only upload 500 mb per week

Make Your Own Website

This is the approach I took, but it isn't for everyone. Check out the advantages and disadvantages of hosting your own website and then decide for yourself. For 95% of you, this probably wouldn't be a good idea since, if you are reading this, chances are you don't know how to put a website together. HostICan is the web hosting service I use, but there are many, many of them. I pay $5.56/month for unlimited disk space - a little bit on the high side but there are a few extras I thought were worth paying for. Choose the one that fits your needs the best (HostGator is another one I've heard is good).

• You have complete control over the look and feel of your website. You can add your own free blogging and picture gallary software. If you are into advertising you can place the ads however you want.
• The site can double as a place to back up your photos. See the page on Storage and Backup for more information on this.

• You have to have knowledge of how to build and maintain a website.
• It will generally take a little bit more time to maintain the site

• I wouldn't start out on a trip planning to maintain a website unless you are totally comfortable with being a webmaster or having someone back home do it for you (I've actually have met quite a few people who have a friend or family member maintain their website). If you plan on learning how to do it on the road, be prepared to spend a lot of time working on your website. This, in my opinion, will defeat the purpose of the trip.
• If you are going to have a simple website, you could get away with having no computer - only flash drives and rely on internet cafes. Any software you need, you could use Portable Apps (they have an awesome FTP and graphics program I use quite frequently) or the software built into your website's host.
• There are four ways I can think of to maintain your website: program in straight HTML and use only Word Pad, use a program such as Dream Weaver to help you build a site, sign up with a web hosting site that has built-in tools for creating and maintaining a site, or have someone at home do the work for you.
• There are some great free open source software which you can incorporate into your website to create your own personal picture gallery and blog. I am currently using WordPress for my blog and Coppermine to display my photos (see my Coppermine gallery and WordPress blog to get a feel for what they look like). It's extremely easy to integrate this into your website if your website host supports cPanel and has Fantastico integrated into it. This allows one click installations of these programs.
• To make things simpler and easier, you can link to any commercial site from your website. For instance you can link to your Blogger or Flickr account to incorporate a blog or picture gallary into your website. Similarly you could link to your YouTube videos to incorporate videos.

Social Networking

Twitter and Facebook have become commonplace in today's society as ways to keep in contact with friends. They are also great ways to meet new friends. The best part of them is that they are both quick and easy to update - making it very simple to let your friends back home know what you've been up to.