New year - new travel plans? Christmas is usually about family and home, so perhaps it is inevitable that wanderlust creeps in around this time of year.

Here are some travel quotes to whet your appetite and get you thinking about travel...

Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson ~

I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine.

~Caskie Stinnett~

The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only one page.

~ St. Augustine of Hippo ~

Not all who wander are lost.

~ J. R. R. Tolkien ~

If you do nothing unexpected, nothing unexpected happens.

~ Fay Weldon ~

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.

~ Douglas Adams ~

A good traveler has no fixed plans, and is not intent on arriving.

~Lao Tzu ~

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

~Mark Twain ~

A nomad I will remain for life, in love with distant and uncharted places.

~ Isabelle Eberhardt ~

To travel is to discover that everyone is wrong about other countries.

~Aldous Huxley ~

The traveler sees what he sees. The tourist sees what he has come to see.

~G.K. Chesterton ~ [ouch that rings a bell]

We wander for distraction, but we travel for fulfillment.

~Hilaire Belloc ~

Like all great travelers, I have seen more than I remember, and remember more than I have seen.

~Benjamin Disraeli~ [with my memory that strikes a cord]

The most important trip you may take in life is meeting people halfway.

~Henry Boye~

Love to travel, But hate to arrive

~Albert Einstein~

I dislike feeling at home when I am abroad.

~George Bernard Shaw~

Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure, than to take rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer too much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.

~ Theodore Roosevelt ~ [ok, not really a travel quote I suppose but pretty darn good anyhow]

And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.

~ Little Gidding - T. S. Eliot ~ [home sweet home does feel better after travels]

Most travel is best of all in the anticipation or the remembering; the reality has more to do with losing your luggage.

~Regina Nadelson~ [ reality bites?]

Well, if those travel quotes don't make you pensive, itch for the road, persuade you to pack your bags and generally inspire you to travel then you very well may be on the wrong website!

If you have any great travel quote to add, then please do add in the comments below. Please surprise me with a stonking new travel quote that I have not read before ...

Happy travels for 2008

I know, I know. The shame of the lack of blog posts hurts. I hide behind the refrain of "not having enough time".

Anyhow, I have been spurred-on to write a cheeky little missive after attending the PhocusWright online travel conference in Orlando, which I just got back from.

Stephen Kaufer, the co-founder of the legendary TripAdvisor, did a talk that made a lot of sense and was quite inspirational.

To paraphrase and soundbite-ise the whole thing he basically said that the best websites were built on information that was trustworthy. Ok, nothing new there but he went on to make the point that people love generic reviews from other punters but trust their friends more.

The next challenge for Kaufer, then, is to go beyond reviews and develop the realm of 'friend related content'. It is a beady point and at the heart of what many next generation travel sites seem to be tapping into.

TripAdvisor's slogan is get the truth and then go, so they have a great understanding about what motivates the use of the web in travel research. They pioneered hotel review information but can they do friends recommendation and inspiration too? A great area to be exploring and I agree entirely with Kaufer's sentiments.

(Apologies a hurried blog but off on travels myself in 5 hours! Hopefully some interesting travel Blogs from Madagascar to come...)

Straplines....yoiks. The kind of thing you could spend an eternity on and spend zillions of dollars to boot.

Important? Yes, undoubtedly. But how much time and energy do you devote to it when you are setting out into beta-land?

The answer is not much time at all in our first iteration and this was the result:

"Publish, share and explore travel experiences"

followed by:

"Share your travel experiences and inspire others to travel here or there. Happy travels around this amazing planet!"

It kind of does the job; I guess. However, it also, to be frank, seems a little contrived, pompous and...well...you know, not quite right.

We don't quite call a shovel a shovel and our brazen individuality does not quite shine through.

It was time to have another stab.

We spent yonks (well what seemed like an hour or so) scribbling ideas down on scraps of paper, drinking tea and eating lots of cake.

Clueless about travel, so are we? HELP! (hmm, not quite right).

Been anywhere nice lately mate? (come on we can do better than that)

FREE TRAVEL BLOGS & INSPIRATION: THAT'S RIGHT 100% FREE (er, not our style, know what I mean?)

...and so on and so forth.

Then we hit upon the notion of:

Love travel? Share it (Not bad but not too informative about our inspiration mission).

This then turned into....

Love travel? Let's inspire each other (hey, that's a bit better).

Which morphed into...

Travel here or there? Let's inspire each other.....help each other....guide each other....(now that has something)...

After a bit more head scratching and some words discarded onto the editors floor we went with:

"Let's inspire each other"

(note: when you click on the word "inspire" on the 'here or there?' homepage it changes to "help" and then again to "guide". A bit of cunning fun.)

Plus an explanation about the tools we offer:

"Share your travel experience - publish photos, travel blogs and videos of your trips"

What do you think? Get the message across? Love feedback.

ps. A few of you have asked about a site guide. We agree this will help tons and it's on the list. We are just dying to launch a few more features on the site first...

You may have noticed we sneaked in an update last week and didn't get around to telling you all about it. So, here's the lowdown:

• Browsing places has begun to be overhauled now with a lovely world map to help you browse continents.
• Once on a continent you can drill down further into countries as before but now you can browse through all the experiences for that continent too.
• Searching experiences is far more flexible. You can search for members and use keywords as well as filtering by place. (TIP: Switch tabs and your search query remains)
• Ever wondered what people said after you made a comment? Well, now we have made an area for just that purpose. Under 'Your statistics' there is a new link called 'comments made'.
• There are some great improvements to creating experiences on route, but for now there have been a few little adjustments including a hover effect so you know what block you're dealing with and the nudge arrows staying in place when you move blocks. Nice little touches like that :)
• You can sort experiences by latest, rating, comments and views when listed for a member or a place.
• You can see how many views your profile page has had in your stats.
• You now get an email if one of your experiences is marked as 'Editors Pick' and the amount of these you receive is tracked in your statistics.
• Search for your friends and family from your contacts page by name or email
• You can also find and invite people from your Gmail, Yahoo! and Hotmail accounts.
• And as Tom mentioned last time we have now moved to a bigger, better, faster and sexier server so everything should be far nippier.

The next few updates will introduce some pretty major improvements so watch this space. Remember, please keep your feedback coming. It is much appreciated and you might find your suggestions are implemented faster than you expect.

And that as they say is that, for now...

Quick conundrum in brief...

Yesterday we debated whether we were nuts to have the number of members and experiences on the homepage. The logic was that is was fun to see exactly how big the site was.

Nice idea, right? Transparency, openness and a little bit of fun for all the early members to watch as the community grows.

Reality: Whilst we are in beta and pottering around working on product, product and more product; tweaking; dabbling; experimenting and improving...the numbers are rather small. In fact our membership after two months stands at 230 members. That doesn't sound so big does it? Ok, so we can mount the defence that we are not concerned, because the great members are all super-human travellers and have added a fabulous array of over 500 travel experiences. The question is: should we remove it and give the illusion of gazillions of users?

Other numbers don't sound so pitiful. We have had 9,395 (whose counting? Crumbs Google Analytics is cool but that's another blog) unique visitors to the site.

A recent survey (darn it can I find it?) suggested that only 1-3% of users actually write reviews on community sites. Bingo! We appear to be bang on target. Beers all round. Ok, so it is still pretty humbling and we have a long way to go to achieve our dreams...

Anyhow, after a short debate (2 minutes 28 seconds) we decided we would stand our ground and keep the real number of members on the site. At least it is a daily reminder of our mission. Every new user is a VIP and each one contributes to make the site a better place to share travel experience. Our priority is to make the site so darn useful that our users want to join us to share travel inspiration and tell the world and their dog about the site. We are what we are and it should be even more rewarding as the number scoots upwards to the stars (he said dreamily).

I feel a little guilty but I confess that the lack of an Antarctic travel experience was getting to me.

Action speaks louder than words, right? Right.

After a bit of debate with myself about nature vs nurture (ok, not a very long one), I thought what the heck and I started browsing YouTube for some nice video clips of travel experiences in the Antacrctic.

I was a little surprised what folks get upto on the ice continent. Obviously cold climes make people want to do silly things and so: Antarctica: Naked Swimming, Windsurfing and an ulterior motive was born.

Whilst this is not my idealised image of Antarctic travel inspiration, perhaps we will soon have the real thing to compensate for my artifice...anyhow, who said travel inspiration had to be sensible.

Phew, Antarctica now shows up on the homepage as a link. I can sleep at night ;-)

Team Kukulcan are alive and well (just) on their London to Mongolia Rally adventure. Check out the latest of their missives from Russia, where the adventure seems to be hotting up:

Team Kukulcan - The Mongol Rally Part 4

Previously on the Adventures of Kukulcan:

Team Kukulcan - The Mongol Rally Part 3

Team Kukulcan - The Mongol Rally Part 2

Team Kukulcan - The Mongol Rally Part 1

Good luck and look forward to the next installment. The Road gets considerably bumpier from here on in...

We have been keeping a low profile as we beaver away creating a product that we are proud of. However, we are pleased to get the word out (just a little) as things start to look ship-shape and we have more intriguing content created by our members.

There have been several nice bits and bobs written about us, which is perhaps suprising given how early stage we are. But some coverage yesterday in Sunday's the People newspaper takes the biscuit as the most amusing so far:

"Weird website is wonderful"...hmm...I think we can learn to live with that. If we were a Film or Theatre production we may start quoting the People as saying hereorthere.com is "...Wonderful".

Other coverage we have had includes: Budget Travel, who say 'find great travel ideas from other travelers' , Mashable - calls us 'an easy to use travel blog' and Blog Nation, who call us a social travelblog to share your experiences. It is always a little hard reading what people say about you before you have really got to where you want to be - we are in beta after all. For example we don't really think of ourselves as a blogging tool but something more. We love feedback though, so keep it coming - good or bad. We want to get better and better.

Some comments have said that we need more travel experiences on the site. Believe me, we are working on it...you can help if you like ;-)

Yay! We have just released another update. Privacy has been on our minds a lot in the last few weeks, so this update addresses the major concerns. Here's a quick summery of what we've done:

• You can edit your contacts directly from your contacts page
• You now have the option to block nasty people from communicating with you
• You can decide to only allow members on your contact list to receive notifications when you add new experiences
• We've given the main experience pages some design love
• You can now sort any members' experiences by latest, rating, comments and views
• We're making it easier for search engines to find you experiences
• Lots of other small bugs and improvements you won't want to read through

We're moving on to a bigger, fast server in the next few days, to make the site even snappier. I'll keep you posted!

It has come to my attention that Antarctica is the only Continent that we don't appear to have a travel experience for.

Ok, so I know we are small, just starting out, a few weeks into beta etc etc but really, not one experience in Antartica. Zero - nada - zilch for a whole continent! I know we have a lot to do but that is just rubbing salt in the wound.

Can anyone come to the rescue?

Here is a summary (for the number crunchers amongst you) of our continent coverage:

Europe Travel Experiences - Rated 1 153 experiences, 136 members there and 313 ratings.

North American Travel Experiences - Rated 2 89 experiences, 66 members there and 173 ratings.

Asian Travel Experiences - Rated 3 81 experiences, 28 members there and 157 ratings.

South American Travel Experiences - Rated 4 37 experiences, 3 members there and 71 ratings.

African Travel Experiences - Rated 5 37 experiences, 8 members there and 66 ratings.

Australian and Pacific Travel Experiences - Rated 6 20 experiences, 6 members there and 36 ratings

Antarctic Travel Experiences - Rated 7 0 experiences, 0 members and 0 ratings - a Hat-trick ;-(

Ok, not overwhelming but a start. Anyhow, we are still at a very early stage and we have other things to focus on, so if you do have a travel experience for Antarctica, put us out of my misery and please add it.

Come to think of it we are bit thin on folks, experiences and activity in general in Oz, Africa and South America too. Right; time to dig out the address book.

Hold onto your seats for a gripping account of our Country rankings next.... ;-)

Happy Travels (in Antarctica)

We have already had a couple of modest experiences posted on the main Here or There? site from Team Kukulcan. The four chaps and the two Micras were heading for Prague the last time we heard form them. The first post was in London and the second was from Göttingen, Germany

Not only was a party on the cards on Sunday night in the Czech capital with all the other Mongoliers? (what is the correct term?), but they were going to rendezvous there with the fifth and final team member, Ingrid.

Carrying on from Hugo's post on Saturday I wanted to share with you some of my photos of the two Team Kukulcan cars leaving Hyde Park on the rally.

The Arrival

The two Micras line up in Hyde Park

The Mexican flag, a very important accessory

The Red Car: Itzam on the left, and Gustavo

Full to bursting point!

Farewell photos for friends and family

The White Car: Edmund on the left, and David

Gustavo videos the assembled crowd

Gustavo sports his sombrero

Broken down already, and needing a push?

No, just a stunt for the cameras!

Final farewell...

We will endevour to keep you posted on their progress!

We were excited to be contacted by the Team Kukulcan network who were seeking last minute charitable donations for their brave Mongol Rally 2007 attempt...

For those of you who don't know, The Mongol Rally can be summed-up as follows:

• driving from London to Mongolia
• you must have a car under 1000cc
• you must raise £1,000 for charity
• it takes roughly 3 weeks and 8-10,000 miles
• points are not awarded for speed but for eccentricity and utter absurdity
• the goal is to get there in time for a black tie dinner in Ulaanbaatar
• cars are auctioned for charity in Ulaanbaatar (this is not just for fun)
• this is one of the worlds great travel adventures...

The Mongol Rally is organised by The Adventurists - Mongol 2007 Rally and this year promises to be another legendary adventure. hereorthere.com went to visit the London start of the Mongol Rally which had 200 eager entrants, live Mongolian music and much nervous excitement.

Team Kukulcan , are an international team (Dave, Ed, Itzam, Gustavo and Ingrid) from the UK, Spain and Mexico. They are raising money (hint) for Mercy Corps Mongolia and Send a Cow. We are proud to say that the HoT team were able to rustle up a small donation in support of Team Kukuclan to become one of their sponsors alongside the Mexican Tourist Board. In return we get some stickers on the car and hopefully the odd snippet of news on their adventures.

After some last minute juggling of cars (the Jeep keeled over) Team Kukulcan opted for a duo of sensible but cute Nissan Micras. Good choice team...

Here are some photos (to come) and videos of the Rally start....

Video overview of the atmosphere (note the subtle product placement at the end...ahem):

Confession: It was quite exciting to see our (rather low key beta) logo on a physical object rather than just a computer screen.

Kukulcan car 1 (white) needed a push start but the Mexican contingent were off to a fine start:

Final handshakes and well-wishing:

We hope the team will keep us all posted with their latest adventures as they cross 6 mountain ranges, 12 countries and many other more foxing challenges that is 'The Mongol Rally 2007'...

Read more about the Mongol Rally 2007 jealousy experience in Hyde Park which has some more photos, videos and coverage of the start.

Good luck from the hereothere.com team (and boy are we envious).

On 7.7.7 the "new 7 wonders of the world" were announced.

And a tremendous set of travel locations they are too, as everyone who loves travel will know.

Here they are on the New 7 Wonders of the World Website:

The Great Wall

Petra, Jordan

Christ the Redeemer, Rio

Machu Picchu

Chichen Itza

Roman Colosseum

The Taj Mahal

But hang on...I'm not sure about that. I don't want to name names but I would dispute a couple of these. Where is Angkor or the Pyramids of Giza? I thought these were undisputed royalty of travel destinations and personally I thought that Tikal was pretty hard to overlook.

The New 7 Wonders project does include a List of Finalists , to try to keep controversy down to a minimum, but just how relevant is this top 7 list then?

Apparently millions of people voted and someone is always going to get missed out, right?

The Pyramids of Giza, Egypt apparently boycotted the whole thing, saying that they are The Only True Wonder of the World....well, that is one approach.

Call me skeptical but is this not simply a case of which sights got most organised into rousing local punters to get voting?

Maybe we are on thin ice here (confession: No Petra, Colosseum or Chichen Itza yet...come on guys and gals!) but is the way in which these travel locations were chosen really fair? Let's hope we can do a better job on hereorthere.com of collating what real travellers believe are their best experiences and let the community decide. Now there is a challenge...

Ultimately our dream is to be able to create your "Personal 7 wonders of the world" which has to be an improvement, right?...watch this space.

What do you think about the 7 that were picked and their authenticity? Let us know.

Happy 'ticking-off-the-7' on your travels

Editorial craftiness vs. the ultimate algorithm.... this was the burning question when deciding how to select the most interesting travel experiences to present on the homepage of www.hereorthere.com.

We started off with an algorithm, based on the number of views, star ratings, number of star ratings, number of comments and validity of the author. However, you quickly get bogged down in gaming issues and a self-perpetuating cycle of popularity (that means Seema's paragliding experience dominates the top slot).

Would switching to an editorial selection be a cop-out?

Would it be the equivalent of laying down our code in a pathetic surrender?

The HoT team found strength in a curious place: YouTube. YouTube's top video picks have always been chosen by hand. Hang on, you mean that Google (the algo and tech masters of the universe) purchased a Company that relies on good old fashioned editorial values for its homepage...yup.

Decision made: Man 1. Machines 0.

(caveat: we are still huge believers in cunning code and all things algorithmic but nice to know that the human touch can come up trumps in certain situations every now and then)

I'm happy to announce we've released a significant update today!

There are too many improvements to list them all without the risk of serious boredom setting in, so here are the major changes:

• New member listing pages so you can find your way around all our wonderful members better
• We've added Editor's Picks to the homepage because it was clear to that the cult of seema's 'Hang gliding over Rio' experience was going to overwhelm us unless we acted fast.
• You can now delete and edit any comments you have made, and delete comments members have left on your own experiences. This will allow you to make corrections, and should help you deal with Trolls - not that we have any yet ;)
• We now let you import contacts from Yahoo and Hotmail email accounts. This should help you find people you know on the site and spread the word quicker. We'll be adding to the list of supported email accounts in the near future.
• Plenty of RSS feeds. You can now subscribe to the latest experiences on the site by continent, country, place and even member.
• Rotating of images is now possible when you are creating and editing your experiences
• We have improved search relevancy and presentation of search results
• You are now able to send links out to people of other people's experiences

We hope you enjoy the new features and fixes. We really appreciate all your brilliant feedback, so please keep it coming. We'll try and fit your requests into forthcoming updates.

Loads more to come soon!