Blogs

At last it's time for another Freestyle Open, the quarterly e-Marginalia travel story contest, and I'd like to introduce the nine finalists. Some enchanting travel writing and some stunning photographs are in store, so dive in and spread the word! Ghosts of Gloucester, by John Regan

Some things never change. This time of year that little jingle is paired mostly with taxes, but for those of us who've grown up with the New York Times and NPR as our primary news sources, even the smallest changes attract tons of attention. Not bad attention, just palpable notice. Yes, like millions of other New York Times online readers, I've lost my equilibrium - if only a little and for a fleeting moment or two - upon discovering that "something happened to the layout!" It didn't take more than a couple of blinks to spot the explanatory editor's note from Editor in Chief, Leonard M. Apcar. So it wasn't a late April fool's joke...

Something new and noteworthy has floated across my radar. A video "insiders guide" to neighborhoods across the world boats the TurnHere.com website, but their slogan does a better job of cutting to the quick of it: Short films. Cool places.

"TurnHere.com is a new Internet video destination which chronicles different neighborhoods and places across the country through the use of Internet video films. Created by professional and amateur filmmakers specifically for the Internet, TurnHere.com's high-quality videos offer a first-hand, insiders look at different destinations around the country, and are hosted by real people who live there. Films focus on the people, culture, history, local businesses and political landscapes specific to each destination."

Sarah Freddie, a Japan-bound UMass Amherst student with a penchant for travel writing, explains in a GoNomad article that it provides a

"unique alternative to the once quintessential travel guide. Turnhere.com is a website that features videos made specifically for the internet, chronicling destinations around the world... [that] give informed, insiders' perspectives into the locations they present."

I've watched several of the roughly two minute videos, and love the idea. Especially as the number of videos increases. It's still new and therefor a bit sparsely populated, and many of the videos I watched are primarily shilling for local businesses. And the video streaming isn't perfect even though I'm on a lightning fast connection. Videos get interrupted while streaming to let more data download which is frustrating, but it's probably just a symptom of early success that can be resolved by dilating their bandwidth.

"Guests of the Taj Lake Palace Hotel in Udaipur, India, a city near the Pakistani border in

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Australian travel writer, Peter Moore, was recently written up in a student newspaper called The Daily Nouse. I loved his book 'The Wrong Way Home' described as follows in the interview: Peter’s most popular travel book so far in the UK has been 'The Wrong Way Home', in which, after a spell working in Britain, he decided he was going to use the remainder of his budget (just over £2,000) to get home to Sydney without going on a plane; “I wanted to travel home overland – without flying – as a way of blowing my mind and enriching my life.” The trail followed by Peter was originally popular with the hippies of the 1960s, who often took the journey to the Far East in droves.