Best Travel Tweets

World Hum's now voting on the Top 10 Travel Tweets of the month -- an interesting idea, and one I wouldn't want to be responsible for figuring out.

Brings up the question, what are tweets for?

Many are joke responses to friends, others are simply 'blog billboards' with simple posts that link to writers' own blogs. That can be useful in moderation -- I do it -- particularly if there's ENOUGH in the tweet to make the tweet itself interesting. 'Swine flu is no scare for locals and travelers here in Palenque: see link.'

All too often, some people ONLY give links, and I lose interest in following them.

That brings up the art of the one-off tweets without links. An idea/message conveyed in 140 characters or less -- and that's it. World Hum is right to reward the best of that sort of tweet. I've try to do that every now and then.

I'm not on the road these days, and my walk to my rented office isn't exactly a real travel experience most days, so I have to play with such tweets. And I was sort of proud on my ROLLING STONES GUIDEBOOK TO NEW YORK CITY last week:

@reidontravel Rolling Stones' guidebook to NYC: walking through Central Park, west-side rats, uptown bedbugs, meeting divorcees, futile charity on 7th Av

Lyric references:

• 'Miss You' ('I've been walking in Central Park, singing after dark, people think I'm... cra-zy')
• 'Shattered' ('rats on the west side, bedbugs uptown')
• 'Honky Tonk Women ('I laid a divorcee in New York City')
• 'Shattered' ('shmata! shmata! shmata! I can't give it away on 7th Avenue')