STA travelbuzz’s Best Travel Tools: videoblogging and blip.tv
Can there be anyone out there who hasn’t pretended to be Michael Palin or David Attenbrough? I mean, who hasn’t donned a panama in a foreign city and quizzed locals about their customs in a gently humorous way? Or gone all enthusiastic-and-whispery whilst wriggling through jungly undergrowth? Now, thanks to the glory of Web 2.0, we can all live out our TV travel guru fantasies by videoblogging, or ‘vlogging’ as it’s sometimes called.
Anyone can record a travel video. If you’ve got a fancy high-def camcorder, all the better, but nowadays every modern digital camera has a video feature, every laptop has a webcam, and every mobile phone has an easy filming function. And once you’ve got some travel footage, blip.tv is a simple and popular site that will help you upload your clips onto a personalised homepage, organise them into channels, post them on your blog or other social media venues, store them in a secure archive and share and discuss them with others. Get a free account here and you’ll be taken step-by-step through the process.
For an example of what you can achieve, look at the Big Travel Project on blip.tv, where ‘interactive world traveller’ Bill videocast daily from his six-month global adventure, sustained by tips and recommendations from his online viewers.
A travel vlog could be as simple as a daily talking head done on your laptop from your hotel balcony for your friends and family, or as elaborate as an edited masterpiece with music and you in full pseudo-Palin flow. You know you want to.
