I will be bold and say that I consider this a travel blog and an honest one at that. I came across this blog from National Geographic Traveler, entitled Blogs: The Caveat
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/traveler/resources/st_blogs0701/blogs.html

Well, I guess that none of the advice applies to this particular magazine. First of all, one of their examples of biased blogging was of the Netherlands Tourism Board who hosted some bloggers who agreed to put a logo on their blogs and be interviewed about their trip.
Scandalous. Another blogger was paid and given a computer and free admission to attractions by Milwaukee Tourism in exchange for writing about her experiences. Yes, this would officially be advertorial, but I have yet to see any publication produced by a tourism bureau that warns visitors of the horrors, boring attractions and bad food found in town. A tourism guide is by and large advertorial and people who write advertorial should be compensated, although perhaps the Milwaukee blogger was undercompensated for her work.

NGT should expect that savvy readers of their blog might assume that the same caveats apply to them. When was the last time that you saw negative stories in NGT? When was the last time that you saw negative stories about destinations in any travel magazine? Think hard. Bet that you can’t remember ever seeing any such article in a travel magazine.

The purpose of this blog is to give an honest overview of bicycling touring, planning and our trip. If somebody wants to pay me money to write positive copy about them, that is fine with me. Of course, I would disclose it although offering something like this in the first place is very unlikely to happen.
I think that NGT’s real agenda for writing such an article is that bloggers provide an alternative to travelers and competition to magazines, which is perceived as a real threat to mainstream publishers.

Yep, take everything that you read with a grain of salt. Read the journals at . Look at the different opinions and experiences that individuals had on the exact same route. None are exactly alike, nor are any of us. That’s what makes these touring and the accounts so interesting.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 7:47 pm and is filed under General. 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.