501 Places

In May 2009 I set up 501 Places and posted my first entry. At the time I knew nothing about blogging and had decided to set up this site with the simple aim of keeping to a discipline of writing 500 words a day while I pitched for freelance work. Two and a half years [...]

Update (26/8):  this post has clearly generated a lot of strong opinions; mainly I suspect as a result of me not articulating what I wanted to say very well. I won’t alter the original text in any way (that would be wrong given the many comments below that provide far more of value than the [...]

Last night’s debate in London, organised by FourBGB and TravelBloggersUnite, brought together bloggers and travel companies and (as far as I am aware) set a precedent in this respect. Both sides listened attentively and I think most in the room would agree that not enough is known about what one side might want or need from the other. [...]

There’s an oft-quoted fact that 70% of our communication in a face-to-face encounter is non-verbal. In other words, we absorb more information from tone of voice and body language than we do from the actual words that we hear; that speaking to another person by phone risks losing much of the impact of our words [...]

Two years ago I published my first post on 501 Places. Since that day I’ve posted another 463 posts and enjoyed many online conversations and face to face meetings that have come as a result. I look back and see that I wrote a post on a similar theme 12 months ago, so perhaps it’s [...]

This week’s guest post comes from Ben Colclough, a founder of Tourdust and in recent weeks a contributor to the illustrious Huffington Post. As the title suggests, the subject in question has been covered several times already on other blogs, usually from the perspective of the blogger. It is refreshing therefore to read Ben’s insights [...]

Today’s post is the 400th entry on 501 Places. I make that somewhere in the region of 200,000 words – it sounds like a lot when I put it that way. My first 100 posts took me a mere three months to write; the road from 300 to 400 has taken over six months. So [...]

As a hectic week draws to a close I thought it worth reflecting on the recent St Albans blog trip. For those who missed my previous post on the subject, I invited five of Europe’s finest travel bloggers to stay in my home town of St Albans before and during World Travel Market. The event [...]

Today’s post is a transcript of my speech for the Travel Blog Camp on Tuesday night (9th November). It’s a bit long (not unlike the speech itself) but for those who missed an excellent event, I hope this post provides some points of interest and a few familiar thoughts. I want to focus on three [...]

This weekend St Albans will play host to five of Europe’s prominent travel bloggers. I’m very much looking forward to welcoming four old friends and one that I’ve yet to meet in real life to my home city. I’ve had a lot of fun organising this event and I’ve stressed to those attending that this [...]