A Travelblogging Community

You’d have to be blogging from underneath a rock (or be blissfully disconnected from blognews) to not know that BlogHer was last weekend. If you’re a regular reader of Nerd’s Eye View, you know that I didn’t go. The first reason I didn’t go was because I felt like the offerings were insufficiently enticing for this travel crazy blogger. I later received a shockingly generous offer of sponsorship from Uptake, but by then, it was too late, the conference was sold out.

I hear that Suzanne Reisman did a terrific job of running the far too short travelbloggers meetup. And Debbie gathered names and has (wow, thanks!) now published a list of women travel bloggers – it’s here and you can add yourself in the comments.

I am so sorry I was not in that room. It’s not just that I didn’t get to meet you, it’s that I missed out on the conversation about What Travelbloggers Want. Luckily, the folks that were there have not been shy about sharing their feedback with me. If you haven’t guessed, I think blogging about travel is, well, the sh*t, and probably one of my favorite things on the planet. I’m as disappointed as you are that there was no travel session, but I do think that BlogHer has the potential to deliver the goods to my fellow wanderers.

In the meantime, there are two messages that came through loud and clear in the feedback. First, people are looking for you, travelblogger, and they can not find you. And secondly, there’s no focused travelbloggers community. I really want to help. Really.

Enter the Internet. Good lord, it is easy to make stuff happen. Dear Internet, I love you.

I’ve added a forum to Nerd’s Eye View that I hope will serve as a starting point for that community you’re missing. If nothing else, I hope you’ll introduce yourself, share a link to your blog, and maybe ask a question or two. It’s a start.

A few caveats:

• I’ve not run a forum before, it’s brand new to me. Please be patient while I work out the technical details.
• There’s no reason for me to expect otherwise, but please stay on topic – travel blogging related posts only! While I have included a place for discussing travel – because it’s what we love! – there are lots of boards – at BootsnAll, Lonely Planet’s Thorn Tree, Matador, Rick Bless His Big Brown Shoes Steves, oh so many others, that do a great job of talking about destinations, but not so many places that focus on travelblogging.
• Finally, profanity, abuse, spam, won’t be tolerated (duh). Okay, I’ll probably be lax on the profanity if it’s used in a travel related manner. As in: “Angkor Wat was effing awesome!”

Registration is easy and the boards are open. Let’s get connected.