I love to travel, and I think that everyone gets a bit of wanderlust now and again. The trouble starts when we get back from our travels and want to show off our photos to friends. Let's be honest: No one really wants to see all of your photos, and hear you drone on about your trip and who you met and what you did. If only there were a community dedicated to travel where people could share their photos, blog their experiences from the road, and join a social network of people who love to travel and are interested in reading and sharing one another's experiences. Wegor (pronounced we-go-er, partially a jab at all of the other Web 2.0 services that add an "r" to the end of their names) is aiming to be just that.
Wegor is relatively small and new, but it already has a fairly large and active user community. The list of members is a couple hundred strong, and many of the site's most active members blogging and sharing photos from different countries around the globe. Some of the featured members are from Sweden and Austria as well as the United States, and their photos are from their hometowns along with the places they've visited.
Accounts at Wegor are free, and each month you get 50MB of storage that you can fill with photos of your travels; you can organize the photos into albums. You also get a blog that you can update like a trip diary, and a personal map (using the Google Maps API) to update with your location, where you're going, and where you've been. I had some difficulty adding locations on the map that I had visited, but other members have their maps populated with destinations they've visited, so it might have just been me. At the same time, the ability to add your locations on a map that others can view is a great idea.
All of the other features at Wegor worked flawlessly, however. Editing my own blog was simple and easy, and although Wegor doesn't appear to have a method in place for blog updates or photo uploads from mobile devices, if your mobile device has Web access, you can update your Wegor account from the road. The site appears to be more about updating your blog and your photo galleries after your trip is over rather than keeping a travel diary. Some users do both, though; some of the blogs on the site appear to be updated with each step of the writer's journey, and others seem to be travel reviews of the places the author has visited and what they thought about the trip.
Either way, the site is easy to use and easy to browse. You can view members, read their travel blogs, and browse their photos with a few clicks, and featured members and their photos are listed on the front page. Some featured members have written about their visits to locations like the Museum of Flight in Seattle, Washington, or posted photos of their trip to destinations as far away as India, Vienna, and Ibiza.
Wegor has the makings of a great social networking site for people who love to travel and love to hear about the journeys of others. The community is growing, but the site has a very insular feel, and the members regularly interact with one another by commenting on their travel posts. If you're looking for a community that's focused specifically on travel and people who won't roll their eyes when you offer to show them the photos from your last vacation, Wegor might be worth a look.
Post by Alan Henry
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