It seems the travel writers obsession with everything travel blogging has reached a new level, uncovering what seems like a harmless charitable initiative.
Tnooz seemed delighted at writing about the Men of Travel Blogging Calendar for 2013 with annoying cyber hat tips all around (complete with laughing emoticon). It’s as if people feel threatened by travel bloggers and scour the internet looking for evidence of unprofessional practices, slip ups or anything out of the ordinary.
Jaw Dropping Madness
What I found to be a harmless charitable initiative, Tnooz labelled it “jaw-dropping madness” and said that it had been “doing the rounds over recent days”.
Huge Travel Blogging Community
Here’s the problem, anyone can start a travel blog, there are little to no barriers to entry to start one. This means it’s a huge community with a lot of people doing many different things in various different ways. To actually lump all travel bloggers together saying that their initiatives such as the calendar aren’t helping travel bloggers is pretty ridiculous. Reading Tnooz you’d think there were only a handful of travel bloggers in world who all sit around a table coming up with these ideas.
There is always going to be bloggers experimenting and trying new things on the fringes, perhaps initiatives that some people don’t rate. Travel bloggers are going to vary in their approach and content, you cannot simply group them all together as one.
How’s Your Travel Writing?
If this were the case then perhaps all these travel journalists/writers are pretty much the same as Thomas Kohnstamm the Lonely Planet writer who never even set foot in Colombia but managed to write a guidebook about it?
It seems odd that the traditional travel writer spends so much time worrying about what bloggers are doing when in reality we’re all the same, we’re all writing about travel on the web.
Time would probably be better spent pitching rather than bitching and if some travel bloggers enjoy navel gazing it seems like a better past time than being a lurking Luddite.
Update – If you want to buy one of these outrageous calendars, you can do so right here: Travel Blogging Calendar
