Blog your travel experience and Win Prizes!

Professionals bloggers, freelancers and aspiring travel bloggers are invited to blog their travel which describe travel experiences in the Philippines 7,107 islands.

How to participate:

1. First and foremost, your blog should be related to your own Philippine travel experiences . It may include restaurant / food review, hotel and resort review and adventure trips.
2. Login to the site using the :::LOGIN::: form provided on the site.
3. A “Write” link will now appear. Click the “Write a Post” link in this menu.
4. Write, save and publish your entry.
5. You can add as many travel blog logs entries as you wish.

Eligibility:

1. You must be a registered user.
2. All blogs submitted between 20th of August 2006 and the 31st of December 2006(site system date) will automatically be eligible..
3. Upload at least one photo that supports your blog entry.

The evaluation of the blogs will be based on these factors:

1. Relevance
2. Quality
3. Originality of content

** LakbayPilipinas.com will be giving away a free Domain Name / blog hosting for One (1) Year!, Columbia Backpackers Bag, Hotel Accommodation and more to come! (Sponsors are welcome!)

Rules:

1. Blogs that use foul language will be disqualified.
2. The winners list will be displayed on the site. If you are one of the winners, we will email you the on how to claim the prizes.
3. Judges decision will be final.
4. LakbayPilipinas.com reserves the right to cancel the contest without any notice.
5. LakbayPilipinas.com is free to use the content of your blog anywhere on this or any other site. You will be given credit wherever the content is used.
6. The publishers have agreed to provide the prices to the winners.
7. Please provide one week for you to receive the prizes.
8. If the winner is located outside the country, the prizes will be sent to your relatives residing in the Philippines.

The first Philippine Travel Blog Writing Contest! Join now!

Incoming search terms:

• lakbay pilipinas blog
• LAKBAY TRAVEL BLOG

If you plan on documenting your next trip online to share with family, friends, and strangers alike, a recent article — How to Make Me Read Your Blog. Or Not. — by Pam Mandel of Nerds Eye View might be of interest.

“Even though I have absolutely no editorial cred other than my reading habits, I’m going to scribble a brief rundown of what catches my eye and what makes me click away.”

Turns out that, editorial cred or not, Pam gives good advice for keeping a compelling travelogue:

1. Make it physically readable, for starters. I can’t read pink text on a yellow background, for example. And sometimes, wow, there is so much going on that I can barely find the text. Which leads me to…
2. Minimize the design toys, please. Everyone wants a custom blog, but if you don’t really know what you’re doing, you just end up with noise. There are lots of perfectly acceptable templates to use, it’s not a crime to use them, especially if you’re a good writer. I want to read you, not hire you as a designer.
3. Reading itineraries is really boring, unless they’re mine. I skip right over blogs that list where the writer went without telling me anything about happened there. These things get hidden in entries – first we went to the Museum, then the park, then we took the subway back to the old part of the city…. Meh. Doesn’t tell me anything. What did you do, see, eat there?
4. Turns out I do want to see a picture of you, who knew? I love the surprise of seeing that some big dude in a Hawaiian shirt and a silly hat is wriitng culturally sensitve stories about visiting holy sites. Or some hard core outdoors climber is a woman of a “certain age.”
5. Speaking of pictures, bring ‘em. It’s nice when there are thumbnails in the posts, or a single photo up top, and then, after reading, I can go click through to an album. I don’t care for it when people use a linear blog format for photoblogs, however, there are better ways to present photos only. If you’re keeping a photoblog, use a tool that’s designed for it, not one that’s designed for text.
6. In general – though not always – I tend to breeze past Live Journal and My Space blogs. Sorry, but mostly, I’m not seeing compelling reading in those implementations, or they’re too noisy to read.
7. Negativity can be okay as long as it’s not cultural imperialism. “Oh my god, I ate the most disgusting thing ever!” is all right as long as it’s followed by a description of what the thing was and how it’s a local specialty and you had the nerve to try it. Props to you for being adventurous. Just don’t diss the locals, man.
8. Too much introspection? “I was thinking about my friends back home and how they were so not having this experience that was totally changing me and everything is different now…” Click. Next please. I get that travel can equal huge transformation, but I’d so much rather read about how that transformation is being experienced. Is that too woo woo to make sense? Maybe. Maybe you get what I mean. Ditto for irony and ubercoolness. What’s the point in traveling if you’re going to be all inside your own head or distant from what’s happening in front of you?
9. Gimme the details! I absolutely want to read about how the waiter looked like he was wearing his Grandmother’s wig, that hair could so not have been real, or how the train station smelled of cigarettes and pee and oddly, roses. Good travel writing doesn’t miss the little things sitting in the corners in the background.
10. Take me with you. This is difficult to define and quantify, but good travel writng makes the reader feel like they’re on the trip too. Put me in the car, on the bus, next to you on the plane. I really want to be there, so take me with you. No, seriously, take me with you. I can be ready to go in, like, 20 minutes.

Thanks Pam!