A Traveling Twitterer to Check Out
I've been on Twitter for some time now, it's become my favorite way to keep up with travel news, to find out about new travel blogs and websites, and to communicate with other travelers.
If you're not familiar with Twitter, it's a micro-blogging site where users enter "tweets" of less than 140 characters answering the question "What are you doing?"
This, of course, could lead to some pretty mundane tweets -- we usually don't want to know what people ate for breakfast, for example, unless they're dining at a really amazing restaurant.
But Twitterers have taken it way beyond that. They:
- Post links to fabulous content they find on the web
- Share titles of interesting books they're reading
- Recommend hotels and restaurants to people who are tweeting from the road
The idea on Twitter is to build a list of followers -- people who want to read your tweets, and to follow people whose tweets you want to read.
#FollowFriday was begun so that each Friday on Twitter people would recommend interesting Twitterers. Since you can trust your friends to recommend people worth following, it's a great way to find new people to follow.
According to Mashable, the Social Media Guide, the #FollowFriday trend began with a single tweet last January:
"I am starting Follow Fridays. Every Friday, suggest a person to follow, and everyone follow him/her..."
And this "trend" has been going on steadily ever since.
Pretty cool, huh?
I'd like to take #FollowFriday a step further (and I'm not the first to do this but would like to add my two cents worth) by posting -- on Fridays, of course, and in more than 140 characters -- about travel people I like to follow on Twitter and why.
Volunteering Global
So who do I recommend this week? I'd like to recommend Sarah Van Auken ( @VolunteerGlobal on Twitter), the creator of Volunteering Global, which teaches about service trips and general travel worldwide.
Sarah started her website in 2005 to educate people about international service trips. The site has grown and now also offers prospective, current and former volunteers a chance to connect with each other and share up-to-date information about their experiences, current volunteer openings and pressing news.
"My goal is to give not only a basic view of international volunteer programs, but also to give them a face. If you have a story, pictures, video, or anything you’d like to contribute regarding your experience with a group, send it along!"
It's other volunteers' experience with these programs that really help me make a decision when choosing a program, so giving the programs a face is very helpful.
Sarah also lists volunteer organizations by region, and many of the programs are smaller ones you might not hear about elsewhere.
She also has an informative blog. Yesterday, for example, she posted an article on her blog called Travel and Medicine -- how to get your prescriptions and medicines while traveling. As someone who's needed medication and/or medical treatment in more countries than I'd care to list, not to mention several prescription medicines I had to take while traveling, I found this post very helpful!
I like to receive Sarah's tweets because she keeps me up-to-date on the current issues in voluntourism as well as service programs I might be interested in.
You can follow Sarah on Twitter @VolunteerGlobal.
Twitter badge courtesy of Vincent Abry at Blog Marketing Web 2.0 et Techno.
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