Recently I’ve been working on a series of articles about paragliding in Taiwan. I’ve been learning how to paraglide, and about the evolution of paragliding in Taiwan, from Malcom Vargas who is, as far as I know, the only certified foreign paragliding instructor in the country. These are some photos from one of my first outings with Malcom taken while he taught two other students: Tim Hillebran and Paul Wesson.
For the last few days I’ve been working on my application for the Glimpse Correspondent Program. I’ve gone through all of my old photos, picked out my favorites, and touched them up. I now have a total of thirty-three pictures. The problem is, I need to narrow my submission down to twenty. If you have a minute, it would be a great help if you could look through the photos and leave a comment telling me which photos you think I should keep, and which I should trash, and why.
It’s nice to be noticed. A couple of weeks ago Matt-Gibson.org was TravelPod’s blog of the day. TravelPod offers free blogs to travelers who want to share their adventures with their friends online.
A few years ago Vice Magazine, a punk counterculture magazine that started out as a welfare work scam and grew into an international trend setting voice for youth culture, started an online television station called VBS.tv. Like the magazine, The television station produces borderline gonzo new journalism style documentaries about the edgiest and wildest topics that you could imagine. The work that the station has done is of such a high caliber, and so interesting, that CNN has partnered with them.
Ranking travel blogs is a tricky business. There is no way of knowing exactly how much traffic a blog gets, and how long visitors stay for, unless you’re the administrator of the blog. There are several tools you can use to rank other peoples’ blogs, but none are completely accurate. However, whenever I read a travel blog toplist, search on Google, or compare blogs using any of the afore-mentioned ranking tools, one is almost always on top: Everything-Everywhere.com. Gary Arndt is, by my best estimate, the most popular solo travel blogger in the world.
Rolf Potts is my favorite travel writer, not just because he’s a great writer, but because he managed to do what I had thought to be impossible: he legitimized backpacker-style travel writing in big-time mainstream travel magazines.
When I first moved to Taiwan I was fascinated with everything. I walked around stupefied, a silly grin permanently plastered to my face, amazed at the incredible world that I had discovered. That lasted for about three years.