Profile Blog

This week I'm profiling a fellow travel blog by a blogger who has clearly logged more miles than I have. The blog I'm looking at is called Hobo Traveler , and it's written by a man named Andy Graham, who has lived as a homeless traveler for more than ten years. It doesn't seem like he has a clearly defined occupation by trade, aside from his blog, and he defines a hobo as a person who travels in order to work. I suppose he could be termed a professional traveler, having covered around 79 countries or more. Andy posts daily-multiple times daily, less often when his access to the internet is limited. I'm not sure how to determine how popular Andy's blog is, but he has been recognized as a top travel blog by Forbes, About.com, and BudgetTravel.com. The comments on his posts vary by the topic of the entry, and I suspect a large number of readers simply don't comment at all.

It's difficult to narrow down which posts are the most interesting from Andy's archive, it's extensive and he posts consistently. However, a couple of Andy's posts that caught my interest. One addressed the issue of airlines charging fees for baggage, which is a topic I could relate to, having been frustrated with the concept of being charged for my luggage. It's something I've taken for granted because US airlines allow two items of baggage at a set weight for free. The other post I found interesting had to do with tipping in other countries, specifically developing ones. My roommates and I had our own issues with whether or not tipping was acceptable while in Europe, and it seemed like we could never agree on it. Andy's perspective on tipping seems logical, and certainly raised an entire discussion in the comments section of this specific entry.

Like my blog, Andy's focuses on traveling and interspersed with his current goings on, he utilizes anecdotes from his trips to pass on tips to readers. Unlike mine, however, he actually travels from one country to another and posts about it. The writer of the blog, Andy Graham, has undertaken his blog as a profession, living off of the revenue generated by the ads on his site, and using his profits to continue traveling and writing about his ventures. The detail exhibited in his entries vary from post to post, sometimes accompanied by photographs of the places he's currently in, and sometimes devoid of them. He covers his topics in as much detail as they allow, never shirking important details in any of his "tip" posts. I don't think his blog has a targeted audience aside from anyone who feels the thrill of traveling from one place to another and truly enjoying the experience. He constantly marks the difference from his own blog and vacation blogs that masquerade as travel blogs, only to become dead once the owners' vacation is over.

After looking through Andy's blog, I'm inspired to take advantage of the immediate adventures to be had in my own town because I won't be able to travel too far. The simplicity and straightforward delivery of Andy's blog has made me think about how I'm going to present topics in my own blog, I like the utter lack of pretense that he offers through his entries, and I hope I can find my own way to present that to readers. In the most obvious sense, I won't be going on intercontinental trips while writing this blog (for the near future, anyhow) and I won't try to hand out tips about traveling, since I haven't had too much experience with the most efficient methods of it. However, I will draw from my own trips and through anecdotes and articles I'll try to sort out issues that I had to confront when exploring Europe during my study abroad.