ONE DECADE IN TRAVEL BLOGGING
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Since I started travelling in college I have always wanted to record as much as I could. Why? Firstly, so I can recall and savour the details of these trips years later. They're one of the high points of life. Secondly, I want to be able to share the experiences with others.
Mute Testimony: Captionless Photo Album
In the early nineties, hiking around Big Bend National Park, it meant a handful of photographs, and, as I remember, some clumsily-shot compass bearings. The compass bearings are long lost. The photographs mutely sealed up in a photo album. It's a not-very-useful record, frankly. I remember key highlights of the trip (a lot of boulder rolling, drinking from algae-green arroyos, and prickly pear thorns), but I certainly forget lots of details. And that's me! On their own, anyone else looking at the trip record sees it sees a bunch of semi-incomprehensible photos.
Personal Papers: Photos and a Notebook
Those trips led to bigger trips, including a month-long climbing trip through Kyrgyzstan. This was an expedition to savour, and I did my best -- shot lots of film and diligently recorded a daily log. This record is substantially better, of course, having a written record. The log is comforting, but more theoretical than practical. It's a small notebook filled with my scrawl which even I find incomprehensible at times. To be honest, I don't think I've ever re-read that notebook in the five years since I was there. As for mapping, I have a poorly-xeroxed map of southwestern Kyrgyzstan, and could tell you I was in the Karavshin valley, but beyond that, have no other authoritative record of our route beside memory.
High-tech But Totally Local: GPS and a Laptop
In 2000 and 2001, I was living in Berkeley. Now I had some high-tech toys, including a laptop and a (shitty) gps, and high-tech friends. We took three different trips out to the western deserts: BLM wasteland in Nevada, Death Valley in California, and cactus country in Arizona. Things went even better here... Lots of photographs, gps tracks, video, and daily log updates on my laptop. I turned the whole collectioin of information into a pretty cool looking photo album. It's almost a website-on-paper. It's got photographs, ephemera, notated maps, and written content. But then, of course, you can only enjoy it if you are sitting in my living room drinking a cup of coffee. Plus, generating it took an enormous amount of work and came months later. (oh, and there was a movie...)
Vicarious Log: Blogger
So now it's 2002. I am back in Singapore working, and Mrs. Blutig is travelling. Of course I'd rather be travelling too, but someone has got to pay the bills. So the deal was, she'd could go everywhere she wanted, but she had to keep a log so that I could vicariously enjoy the trip as well. Thus blogger came into our life. At various times over the last two years Ling (and sometimes me) has been everywhere from Tibet, to India, to Laos, and Norway. The result is pretty decent. I guess my biggest complaint would be that there are not a lot of photos online to go along with the prose. I am pleased with how timely the logs went online (almost realtime) to be shared with everyone else, though.
Promise, But Awful Integration: GPS and MoveableType
So after all these different experiements, it was time for another big trip -- two weeks through the Outback. I set out to make this the best-documented trip yet.
What was different on this trip? I installed Zempt on my laptop. This way, theoretically, any five of us could blog at any point during the trip. As well, two of us had our (shitty) gps's with us, so we'd be recording positions every step of the way.
In theory, the plan was great. In practice, it worked only half as well as I'd hoped.
The whole GPS data-recording system is shabby. Garmin is rubbish -- the hardware is flaky and the software is atrocious. Furthermore, interfacing it with my laptop to record our trip is pretty clumsy. Lastly, taking that recorded data and converting it into something useful to anyone else is tons of work.
The chronic photo problem was also unavoidable -- it is a significant challenge to get 50 rolls of 35mm slide film online three months later.
Even Zempt, the offline blog writer, wasn't perfect. I wound up writing a lot of blogs inside Microsoft Word document, where they languish to this day, waiting for editing, hyperlinking, proofreading, and uploading.
The trip was fun, we recorded more data and experience than ever, but I am still very dissatisfied with how I was able to convert it into a vicarious travel log for others.
THE BEAUTIFUL FUTURE OF TRAVEL BLOGGING
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So on the next big trip I take, what are the keys to making a better trip report?
Record and publish the details when they happen, or very soon after
You forget trip details at a frightening pace. Within days its hard to recall fine points, within a few weeks, you've lost 20% for good, and a month later, you have difficulty with half the details. The small things are what give your articles color. If you can't recall the small things, the article is bland and dead.
As well, even your recorded data begins to decay. Data gets lost, information mis-interpreted, and peculiarties of the information are overlooked.
So to retain as much detail and accuracy as possible, on a daily basis you need to:
..write your blog items
..dump your gps data
..take your photos
..upload the blog entries
Automatically convert the GPS data into formats immediately useful to others
My GPS can puke out all its data to my laptop. Depending on what software I use, I'll have either a mostly-useless proprietary format (MapSource) or a slightly-less-useless open format (OziExplorer). But still, I'm still left with a big raw data file. It's miles away from being helpful to the blog entry I'm writing. Worse, it's infeasible to process this data manually 'from the field.' After all, I'm on an expedition. Time is precious. It's likely that data won't be touched for weeks, if ever.
I want each blog item I write to automatically include a thumbnail map of the area where I wrote the blog item and links to maps of the day's significant waypoints as described in my blog. Maps are pictures that give the article more context for the reader. Waypoints are anchors that allow others to discover the article by its geolocation. (imagine Google searches for the coordinates of an abandoned mine or scenic vista returning my article on the same, nameless place)
Make it easier to get photos online to supplement blog entries.
I made a big investment in my 35mm camera system (EOS 1v, etc), so I am not moving to digital any time soon. I'm never going to get those pictures uploaded concurrently with the blog article. However, I can imagine a system where I had a digital camera, that along with the regular EXIF metadata, recorded the GPS location too. Then as I am writing the article, not only are appropriate maps being uploaded, but photos taken in that area are also included.
THE KLUDGY FUTURE OF TRAVEL BLOGGING
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That was the beautiful future... What about the meantime? I'm stuck with reality -- MoveableType (good!), mapping software (spotty), and a gps (shitty).
My practical goal is to write little scripts and hacks to get me some of the functionality I described above. I'm concentrating on the GPS side of things since I don't use a digital camera (yet). I can have the most impact fastest with the geoLocationstuff -- integrating blog items and waypoints. I've already written a prototype to turn a GPS dump into a a series of blog articles. I'll describe that in a future blog entry.