Lone Dodo's Bali Travel Guide: "Dodo, meet 'Land of the Gods'"
Welcome. This here is the first personal travel guide we created. Below are three sections: First is the finished guidebook, the product! Ready to ship. second is a summary of the concept, and third is the meat -- the relatively simple, easy to use, easy to follow searches that were used to find content.
Note: We cannot make Guidebooks downloadable for external use as they contain copyrighted information. Of course you can read, visit, and compile them as you please for personal usage!
Note: We cannot make Guidebooks downloadable for external use as they contain copyrighted information. Of course you can read, visit, and compile them as you please for personal usage!
Part I: Travel Guide Results
Mount Agung, the revered mountain for Balinese in the Northeast of the island.
Below are videos compiled from Youtube, followed by articles from various sources. Note: We gave these articles our own headlines, usually involving keywords, so that we could look things up easily on the Kindle. This by no means serves to derecognize or belittle the title’s or the authors original work, but is used for convenience’s sake.
Videos
Steps to Making your Lone Dodo Guidebook
A quick summary for creating your own guide.
- Got an Overview: Bali Wikitravel; Bali Wikipedia; Lonely Planet Bali
- Selected topics and keywords to search for: gamelan, Ubud, diving, Gili Islands, surfing, legong dances, kite festivals, real estate.
- Searched sites:
- Youtube: Made specific Google searches on YouTube.com. This gave us a feel for the sights and sounds of a place before arriving. We chose to research gamelans and surfing. When on Youtube, looked for suggestions and views, and discerned for quality of content.
- Magazines, Newspapers for Adventures: For Bali, we choose NYTimes, WSJ, The Guardian, and Australia’s newspaper compiler, news.com.au. These are usually go-tos for any travel destination, (the latter 2 especially since Brits and Aussies travel so much). Regardless of which sources we use, we will start with one location-specific keyword (ie. Bali) and become more specific from there.
- Big travel presences and content-publishers that are useful, credible sources of information: Travel & Leisure is a nice one. Check out more HERE.
- Follow itineraries of champion bloggers. We read what AlmostFearless, Uncornered Market, and Chris Guillebeau had to say. We also took a gander at Nomadic Matt’s travel tips.
- We had sufficient content after that, but also looked up Bali Expats using this . [http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch/advanced_blog_search], because of Bali’s famous expat community of entrepreneurs.
- Youtube: An example search for gamelan: [Bali gamelan site:youtube.com]
- News: [Bali site:www.nytimes.com OR site:wsj.com OR site:www.guardian.co.uk]; [Bali architecture site:nytimes.com]. There is a slight tradeoff between quality search results and the number of sites you use in your search. The Aussie website captures tons of content so requires its own search.
- Magazines and Newspapers. I bunch them into three groups as I search, based on their strengths and specificity.
- [Bali site:Gadling.com OR site:travelandleisure.com OR site:outsideonline.com]. Add Conde Nast Traveller (cntraveller.com) if traveling upscale.
- Note: It may be arduous to create pdfs for travelandleisure.com, because articles cannot be viewed as one long single page.
- [Bali site:eatingasia.typepad.com OR actionasia.com]
- Lonelyplanet.com, tripadvisor.com. Tons of content. Best for finding up-to-date info and itinerary searches. I am more specific here, requesting
[Bali ferry site:lonelyplanet.com OR Bali ferry site:tripadvisor.com] - Superstar Blog searches: I search all four at once, in this format:
[Bali site:almostfearless.com OR site:uncorneredmarket.com OR site:http://chrisguillebeau.com/ OR site:nomadicmatt.com] - If we haven’t seen enough, we go look at other blogs I don’t know: Google Advanced Blog Search and type in keywords: Search “Bali Expat”
- Bali Forum: We Googled Bali expat forum for this and found a forum and guide to Bali called Balipod.com. Some forums are closed to Google searches, some are not. This forum is not.