No, that’s not my life of travel, it’s My Life of Travel, a site where travelling bloggers can document their adventures. Kiera Bailey of My Life of Travel invited me to write a review.

I love the concept of this site, which is so simple it can be expressed in only a few words, as I just did in my opening paragraph. Perhaps the folks there can take a clue from me, and rephrase their description of the site:

“My Life of Travel is a free web-based travel journal and travel research tool that lets travellers record their journeys, map travel histories, share tips with fellow tourists and keep in touch with friends and family, without the need for mass email communication and photo sharing sites.”

As you can see, this is noticeably longer that what I’ve got. What’s the word I’m looking for… ah, yes, verbose.

The site is built in .NET, which one can tell right away by the .aspx extension of the web pages. I found it interesting – uncommon, but interesting – that they chose to explain the technology that makes the site work.

Their service seems to be a win-win situation for everyone involved. Bloggers can host their journals and photos for free with them and make money from the web traffic by using their Google AdSense accounts, and My Life of Travel gets to be an entertaining source of information for many people, and also gets to sell advertising on its own to support its services. We, the web visitors, get to browse all the locations and see the world vicariously, through the eyes of intrepid travelers.

That’s the main draw of this site – for me, the web surfer. I can stumble on some pretty cool photos from different places in the world, and hopefully find out how that area is – what it’s like to travel through there. I might even pick up some useful advice, right? You could even call this site a travel wiki.

In theory, that’s how things are supposed to work. In practice, stuff gets a little boring. I chose to browse journals, and selected a drop-down menu for a location. I said, gee, wouldn’t it be nice to see photos from Antigua? Three journals came up for that, none of them with photos, and all with very little text, mostly one-line titles. It was like that for most smaller or out of the way places. And I suppose that’s to be expected, right? Until their site builds up to a critical mass of users, the world isn’t going to be well represented. One can’t hold that against them. So I chose bigger places, like Paris, or London. Stuff came up in the searches, but for some search results, even though I was supposed to get photos from those cities, I got photos from the countryside. I think the tagging system needs to be tweaked a bit to reflect locations better.

Then I started looking at photos. Most were group photos of people, or people standing in front of stuff – you know, the usual tourist photos. When there were landscape photos, the mix was about 50/50 between the good photos and the fuzzy or blurry ones. Again, typical. I started reading text, and most was the self-serving kind: I met up with buddies, drank some beer, hey, here’s a photo of me with some Guinness… etc. Typical once more, and that’s the caveat. Most people don’t know how or don’t care about keeping journals. They also don’t know how or don’t care to know how to take photos. So most of the stuff on the site is boring, run-of-the-mill, touristy stuff, the kind that’s good for a chuckle and a smirk, but doesn’t leave you feeling you’ve learned something.

If the entire site was like that, it wouldn’t be worth it. But, thankfully, it isn’t. They’ve done something smart, which is to highlight useful/popular member profiles. It also helps that these people take better photos, and usually write more useful things. Here’s an example of a good journal entry, with good photos. This is what makes this site worthwhile. What they need to do is to focus on these people and encourage them to keep blogging and posting. This sort of quality content is valuable stuff.

Bottom line: good travel site with great promise. They need to focus on building up their user base and encouraging people to post useful entries with great photos. It wouldn’t hurt to reward the valuable members through incentives of some kind, financial or otherwise.