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Going Travelling? Try VentureFar.net

Having been traveling through SE Asia for 6 months, I can appreciate the value of good first-hand info about a prospective travel destination. Whenever we happened to be around an internet connection, I found myself scanning prospective activities or destinations on the net looking for blog posts and photos from people who had been there or done that - to set some expectations, eliminate some duds, and collect the “insider info” that decides whether an experience will be a grind or a pleasure.

About mid-May, in the city of Kuching on the Malaysian half of the island of Borneo, I put together a simple automated tool that aggregated search results from Google Blog Search, YouTube, and Flickr onto a single page - I could pass it a travel destination as a URL parameter and get a nice summary output - which streamlined out travel research process.

Now, 3 or 4 months later, I wrapped a bit more UI around it, and rolled it out as a standalone “travel guide” site - VentureFar.net. Its pretty simple, and right now is only displaying canned results (which are updated 4 times a day) for a limited selection of locations - which I’ll expand over time, and supplement by adding a search engine. As to why there isn’t a search interface: Google Blog Search is good but not perfect at filtering out spam, so I’ve actually got a filtering layer that eliminates a lot of trash and promotional jibber jabber from search results - such that when you get down to a destination travel guide on VentureFar, you should see a good selection of first-hand accounts of the destination.

Anyway, take a second to check out VentureFar - a simple, targeted aggregator. If you’re heading somewhere soon, comment back and let me know, and I’ll add it as a canned page.

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