IHT: Testing travel blogs
Roger Collis writes about finding good information about travel destinations on the Internet: Testing travel blogs, with caution. He points out that many hotel sites are often unconvincing:
There are blogs for all seasons and manners of travel, ranging from tedious diaries with blow-by-blow accounts of the writer's meals and musings, to crisp reports and intelligent, entertaining essays on places one has always been meaning to visit. The only way to check the authenticity of a blog is to measure it against what you already know of a place or to do more research yourself.
Here is my ranking of some of the sites he mentions, that deal with Japan and other places in East Asia. I really like when ordinary travellers can add their own photos and stories:
1) Virtual Tourist
2) IgoUgo
3) Wikitravel
4) Travelpost blogs
On some sites, the ads are just too much. It is really annoying to look at the page for Kyoto and find ads for hotels in Las Vegas... And when the maps are as bad as Trip Advisor why should I trust any of the other information?
Yokoso! Japan and Japan National Tourist Organization are two good official websites with facts about visiting Japan.
There are blogs for all seasons and manners of travel, ranging from tedious diaries with blow-by-blow accounts of the writer's meals and musings, to crisp reports and intelligent, entertaining essays on places one has always been meaning to visit. The only way to check the authenticity of a blog is to measure it against what you already know of a place or to do more research yourself.
Here is my ranking of some of the sites he mentions, that deal with Japan and other places in East Asia. I really like when ordinary travellers can add their own photos and stories:
1) Virtual Tourist
2) IgoUgo
3) Wikitravel
4) Travelpost blogs
On some sites, the ads are just too much. It is really annoying to look at the page for Kyoto and find ads for hotels in Las Vegas... And when the maps are as bad as Trip Advisor why should I trust any of the other information?
Yokoso! Japan and Japan National Tourist Organization are two good official websites with facts about visiting Japan.
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