Seven travel blogs you should read

As so much of my work these days involves travel writing, I figured I’d pass along a list of some of the great travel blogs that I read. These websites are excellent sources for ideas—either to write about or travel to ideally both):

• The Economist’s Gulliver—the best English-language new magazine’s business travel blog
• Gadling-–probably the best all-round travel blog
• Jaunted—a travel blog with a pop-culture tint
• National Geographic Intelligent Travel Blog—the magazine’s look at “cultural, authentic, and sustainable” travel
• Rick Steves’s Blog Gone Europe—my favorite travel-guide author shares his experiences from the road
• Road Junky—a gritty, entertaining, and useful look at travel
• World Hum—owned by the Travel Channel, World Hum “focuses not only on destinations, but also on the journey, on travel in the broadest sense of the word”

Any sites I’m missing? Please let me know in the comments.

WordPress updates to version 2.7, and it’s not a release to be skipped

Like many of you, I don’t like it when change comes to a blog platform or social networking site (talking ’bout you Facebook). It takes time to become acclimated with the new layout, and it can be frustrating relearning where to find information.

For once, however, I am fine with such a change (and it had nothing to do with Who Moved My Cheese):

WordPress 2.7 (aka Coltrane) is fantastic.

Released on Dec. 10, the upgrade’s interface is much cleaner and intuitive than version 2.6.5, which I was running previously.

QuickPress, an area in the Dashboard that allows users to quickly add a post, is handy—and was where I wrote this post.

Many bloggers are reluctant to update their software, having to backup, deactivate plugins, upgrade, and reactivate plugins, hoping the process doesn’t destroy their hours of effort.

WordPress 2.7., however, is worth the upgrade.

Behold the renovated (again) ZachEverson.com–feedback appreciated!

As overhauling this blog seemed less daunting than unpacking all of my possessions after my recent move to Louisville, I spent the past couple of days renovating the website. I

• upgraded the blogging platform to WordPress 2.6.5–it has a slew of new features, so many in fact that I only needed to install two plugins
• installed the ShareThis plugin–it appears after each post and allows visitors to easily, um, share the post via social networking and bookmarking sites, blogs, or e-mail (previously I needed three separate plugins to handle these feunctions)
• added the fantastic free Typebased theme from Woo Themes
• corrected a coding problem that caused a lot of punctuation to appear as code (which is certainly not acceptable on a blog that covers grammar and punctuation)

Feedback—good or bad—on the update is appreciated. Thanks!

Andrew Evans wins travel journalism award

Andrew Evans, a former fellow Washington, DC, Gridskipper correspondent, won a silver medal in the Lowell Thomas Travel Journalism Competition’s Guidebook category. Drew earned the recognition for his Bradt Travel Guide on Iceland.

Never having been to Iceland, I haven’t had occasion to read Drew’s book yet. But I hope to both travel to Iceland and read his book soon. His contributions at Gridskipper have been great and useful.

Drew also blogs about his travels and writing at Walked & Walked.

The Obama campaign and new media and social networking

While I’m politically active, this blog isn’t—if you want to read about politics you probably can find a few other websites that delve into the subject.

But anyone interested in online communications and social networking has to be paying attention to Barack Obama’s campaign: Nov. 4 will be the biggest test of the real-life power of that emerging technology.

The Obama campaign isn’t just using, but is distributing quality content via

• A Facebook application
• Podcasts
• Twitter
• A social network on BarackObama.com
• YouTube
• A blog
• MySpace

And the campaign got 2.9 million people to opt-in to receive text messages from it in exchange for being the almost-first person to know whom Obama selected to be his running mate. Think it might use that data as part of its get-out-the-vote efforts?

Will it pay off on November 4? I suspect the Obama campaign has studied Howard Dean’s candidacy in 2004 and realized what it needs to do to translate virtual support into real votes.