Journeys Near and Far

Twitter's Follow Friday: My Picks for October 16, 2009

This week's traveling Twitterers

It's Follow Friday on Twitter again, and this week I have two travel Twitterers I'd like to recommend. 

If you're not using Twitter, I suggest you try it out -- it's free, and a great way to gather cool travel tips, connect with others who have similar interests and, in general, just have fun. 

But it's not necessary to join Twitter to get to know these travel folks -- you can always visit their websites or blogs.

EarthXplorer

The first travel Twitterer I'd like to recommend is JD Andrews, a producer of travel and other types of videos who is known as

EarthXplorer on Twitter. 

Based in Miami, JD  is popular in the Twitterverse, with more than 26,000 followers, and he's an experienced traveler, having spent 19 years traveling to 71 countries in 6 continents. 

In the bio on his web site, EarthXplorer Productions, you can learn more about JD's work.   He showcases some nice travel videos  there and posts interesting videos on his blog of the same name.

I like following JD because he tweets a good mix of travel information, links and retweets, as well as inspiring quotes, and he interacts frequently with other Twitterers. 

You can follow EarthXplorer on Twitter @EarthXplorer. 

Twitter's Follow Friday: My Pick for October 2, 2009

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.