The Top Ten Travel Blogs of 2005
You've been waiting (haven't you?) for the Top 10 Travel Blogs of 2005. Top being based solely on traffic volume which in turn is based on how many of you were grabbed by the headline (or picture of shirtless boys in some cases) and clicked on the link or forwarded the link to friends by email or found it in a web search (which was the real wildcard, some keywords attracted scores of traffic, others none). My promotion of certain articles, such as by posting links to them on online forums, also no doubt skewed the results.
And so, without further delay, the winners are:
#10Gaviota, The Last Cowgirl in Cuba is a story of the crackdown on prostitution in Cuba. This one generated a bit of controversy and so had a flurry of activity generated by the argument over the content. The next entry also incidentally came from Cuba: #9Gay Cuba. Despite my visit being in 1997 (albeit with some recent updates) this blog indicates how scarce and difficult it is to get good unbiased information on travel to Cuba, especially when it comes to topics such as life on the fringes.
On a completely different note, was #8The Open Jaw and Stopover, a practical guide to how to get better value for your airline ticket dollar by knowing about this little known tricks from the airline industry.
Writing about nature was a popular topic this year in Travel Blogs, but only one article made it to the top ten: #7What Goes 'Chrit-Chrit-Chrit', Licks its Eyeballs, and Gives You a Stinky Piece of Tail? This article gives you good reasons not to screw with nature's balances. It was also one of the articles whose popularity seemed to be greatly increased by image searches as it had some very interesting and unusual bug pictures.
The next two entries share nakedness as a theme, clearly a popular theme on the internet. #6 The World Naked Bike Ride was my description of the ride which I participated in Vancouver. And no, before you ask, it wasn't uncomfortable! Whereas #5 Surrealism in the City – Wreck Beach Butoh and other Vancouver Summer Happenings featured naked butoh dancers on Vancouver's Wreck Beach, an annual event.
The next entry clearly filled in a lack of information on the web from the Harley riding crowd: #4 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally was perennially popular.
The next was #3How to Fall in Love with the Biggest City in the World in just Two Weeks, a write up of the sights, sounds and smells of Mexico City. The traffic may have been helped along by people Googling to find out just what was the biggest city in the world, a subject not really addressed by this article but rather telling the readers why they should love it. The next also came from Mexico, #2 Life at the Beach in Puerto Vallarta and San Pancho proving that boys in swimsuits sell blogs. Or maybe that of all my travels in the last twelve months, that was one of the destinations many of you were thinking about for yourself.
And, the top blog of 2005? It was #1Sex and the Single Tico from last January in Costa Rica. This guide to gay life in Costa Rica was incredibly popular in January and the traffic continued all year.
And that's it for the first full year of Travel Blogs. It was an amazing year with a more than 100-fold traffic increase over 2004 and tons of new content, well beyond that listed above.
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Posted by Doug Dosdall on January 2nd, 2005 in Articles.
