World Wide Panorama Evennt Borders

By the way, I forgot to mention
that the next World Wide Pano event is
happening. I’ve contributed to three or four
of these and find doing them and being a part of this project a really cool experience. The World Wide Panorama
event is sponsored by the Geography Computing Facility at the University of California Berkeley. It’s a non-commercial
project, put together and contributed to by volunteers (like me). I do it to get my
pano work
out there and because, well, because it’s an immensely cool project.

Anyway, every
hemispherical solar quarter (or whatever you call the equinoxes and solstices) they hold a new one, and each time there
is a theme of some kind. This spring the theme is Borders, which can really be interpreted anyway you want. I’ve got my
own interpretation which I’ll post about in a week or so when the site is up and running with all the new
contributions. So here’s what you have to do: you need to go shoot your pano NOW and get it done by the 21st. That’s
the last day. Then you have a week or so to build it and then you upload it to the folks at Berkeley. That simple. I’ll
post more about the project in the coming days. But for now, get busy shooting.

Travel Writing Bootcamp

Travel writing
can be a tough business. The pay if low, you really have to hustle to get your stuff out there, and the competition is
fierce. While am acquainted with several folks who have been very successful at the travel writing thing, many folks I
know who have tried to make a living at it got along OK for a while, but eventually retreated to more  consistent
and lucrative work (like accounting), and made travel writing more of a "hobby". 

But don’t
let all that discourage you. If travel writing is something you would like to do…then you should give it a whirl.
What’s the worst care scenario? Maybe you travel somewhere great, you write about it, and then no one buys your stuff?
OK, that’s not quite the worse case scenario. The worse case scenario is that you travel somewhere lousy, get food
poisoning, catch dengue and then trip and fall onto a hill of fire ants just before a murder of crows pecks your
eyeballs out. That would suck.

Well, never mind all that. Chances are you won’t fall on a fire ant
mound. Hopefully. But if you are committed to the travel writing thing, then check out Media Bistro’s Travel Writing boot camp. The 8-we3ek intensiev
course is being taugh tby Gayle Forman whose You
Can’t Get There From Here: A Year on the Fringes of a Shrinking World
, was published in April 2005. I’ve taken a
mediabistro seminar before…and I even taught
one
…so I can vouce that they can be very good. This one might be just the thing to jump-start your writing career.