peace out lonely planet

I feel that the guide book might be evolving. At least I really hope it might be. Two recent indicators of this are Urban Lowdown and Sean Bonner's Metblogs. I learned about Metblogs through a feature in Good. These are both new discoveries, and I am not telling you that they are any good, though they might be, I'll have to explore them a bit more before I develop and opnion on either of them. What I like about them, or the idea of them is that maybe, possibly, those damn writers at the Lonely Planet will no longer dominate the world of backpacker style traveling. And man, do those writers make me crazy. More than them, it is the travelers that won't make a decision with out the LP's approval. I mean I get it, you want to have the inside track to a place, but often times a LP writer may only spend 10 minutes asking questions about a place, and never stayed there or eaten there. The implied advantage of these sites is that local people write them, they really know these places, and they don't have to write a whole book about a whole country in 5 days. So that is my spiel on guidebooking, that is until I get my shit together and write my graphical guide to central america. Oh, one last resource for you facebook addicted or avoiding travelers is Matador a social networking site for travelers. Do it up.