Travel Weekly Blog

Wikis are more useful than blogs at least they contain a range of views. As for guides I am very sceptical. I travelled extensively in Asia long before the lonely planet guys had thought of producing a guide. Your guide was the locals and travellers you met. Lonely Planet may be the best of the bunch but the degree of bias of its writers is huge. Put this together with the time they have to produce a guide (they stay in Bali for example for less than my holiday stay)and what you have is both opinionated and and based on scant information. All too often accomodation guides for example rely on second hand information. I stayed a hotel in India recently well reviewed by Lonely Planet. It was poor by any standards save those of the travelling salesmen who frequent it. Trust your travel guide and you will miss the gems that exist and tread the well worn paths of all the other mindless guide followers. At least the Wiki has a chance of being writen by the real people who have visited recently, not some travel hack.

Thanks for your comments, Les. Can I just point out that I didn't say blogs were the ideal travel guides? Just because we *are* a blog it doesn't mean we think the format is a cure-all.

I think you're right that wikis benefit from a range of views, often from objective and experienced travellers, but I do stand by the criticism that wikitravel's static, flat HTML pages simply don't capitalise on the web's potential to create customisable and easy-to-navigate content. Really my problems with it are about presentation rather than content.

I also think your critique of guides is true, with the reservation that it doesn't take into account the varying levels of confidence out there. My parents are off to India for the first time soon and simply aren't comfortable trusting their luck - a seasoned traveller like yourself might not feel the need for a guide but first-timers do, and it's perhaps a little condescending to assume that makes them 'mindless'.

(And if you're interested I did later post about what I thought a great online travel guide would look like.)

in this instance, you might say the difference between a blog and a wiki is the same as that between one travel bore ranting on about why you should go here and shouldn't go there, and a whole room full talking at once.

blogs and wikis can be great, but at the same time they can be bloody awful - just too much random, unsubstantiated guff, prejudiced views and just plain inaccuracies. At their best they can be immediate and reflect the latest trends; at worst, just plain useless.

The best guidebooks are put together by competent editorial teams; views are vetted and facts checked. the important thing is to find one that's in tune with your own views and tastes and use it accordingly. Other benefits of guidebooks: they're highly portable (who wants to spend their life in front of a computer screen? Oh, sorry, blogging geeks) and usually stuffed full of easily digestable history.

Ultimately, if it's a choice between a wiki written by 'real' people, or a decent Lonely Planet or Rough Guide (presumably put together by a race of space aliens or aqueous creatures toiling in fantasy writing dens), I'd go with the latter. But then I am travel hack, after all.

Ha. Thanks Matt. Though I'm still not sure how blogs got dragged into it. I didn't mention them! Not once! Am I on Candid Camera?

Your point about portability is important too -even though mobile browsing will improve vastly over the next ten years mobile devices aren't going to be practical everywhere. Reception may not be reliable, and in some destinations you just don't want to be walking around waving half a grand's worth of gadget.