Going Local Travel

France fans during the Uruguay game. Copyright Simon Way Two friends of mine in London have embarked on a fantastic project to document every World Cup game from the perspective of the nation’s fans. Photographer Simon Way and writer Angela Balakrishnan will be hanging out in Greek tavernas, American diners, Argentine steakhouses and who-knows-where-else across [...]

I’m sure I’ve said this before, but I really can’t emphasis this point enough: Couchsurfing.com is fantastic for language learners. And not just for hosts/guests. It can be a godsend in your home town too and it needn’t involve a single couch. I have raved about Couchsurfing’s Buenos Aires forum before (see: Top three ways [...]

Where next? A video introduction to the semantic web (aka Web 3.0)   Thanks for everyone who commented on the Guardian Travel Blog looking at ‘where we are now’ with travel networking. So far we’re up to 40-plus comments  and it seems everyone had something interesting to say. So where are travel networks going wrong? Here [...]

Taking Twitter into the real world: Video from CollegeHumor. Some weeks ago I went to a party, which I was invited to via someone on Twitter. It was a Tweetsgiving event (an organisation which, if you get beyond the cringey name, is doing great work raising finds for schools in Tanzania). I was invited by [...]

Word is they’re short on traditional accommodation options for the South Africa World Cup. I wrote a piece today for the Guardian about alternative options, including using sites such as iStopover, Couchsurfing and home exchanging. While researching, I logged onto the South Africa group on Couchsurfing.com to get the current lowdown. Predictably, there are a lot [...]

Continuing on from my blog about the Cashless Man, Mark Boyle, here’s a snippet of info I found on his blog about the social network he’s created called the Freeconomy Community and how he’d hate for it to become the new Facebook. Whereas Facebook’s objective is to keep people on-line, reading their adverts, for as [...]

I’m a big fan of social-networking site MeetUp. Not that I use it very much, but I simply feel comforted to know it exists, so that if I ever have spare time on my hands I can always find interesting new things to do and people to meet. Especially if I go back to London

If you stay in a hostel, your contact is predominantly with other travellers; if you’re in hotel, the receptionist may do a sterling job professing interest in your daily sightseeing, but this rarely goes beyond ten minutes. So how do you break the cycle?

Hooray! A Hospitality Club wedding! Norman Javier, my host last year in Venezuela, and his lovely German girlfriend, Bianca, have just tied the knot in Frankfurt. The couple met when Bianca hosted Javier as he travelled around Europe, crashing with various strangers via Hospitality Club’s online network. Neither of them signed up to the concept [...]

I woke up this morning to find that I’m an "interesting expat". Which was nice. At least so says Matador Network in a piece on 20 interesting expats on Twitter. It’s not the list, but a list, they point out. But let’s not worry about that. Today I’m officially interesting and I am going to [...]