I ran across the Future Expats Forum site recently and thought it was a very interesting read. Many people threaten to leave the United States and go live somewhere else about every election cycle. I don’t really take them seriously. However, some people makes plans to move and live overseas at some point in their lives and this website is loaded with the information they may find important.

The website came about by someone that was interested in living overseas, but couldn’t find much information about the "human side" of what it meant to make this jump in your life. She decided to put the site together to organize her own plans, but also to share the resource with anyone else that may find it helpful.

We’ve done lots of research online, in books, magazines, online groups and the like. I’ve found lots and lots of sites with tremendous information. The one thing I haven’t found is a place where people can discuss the “human side” of moving to another country. How do you tell your elderly parents you plan to move to a different country without hurting their feelings and/or freaking them out? How do you cope with the inevitable frustrations and setbacks as you embark on your journey? Who do you share your victories with?

It’s got me interested for sure. But I’m a LONG way from making this jump. Who knows what the future holds though. I’m going to be sure and bookmark this site for a future reference. Who knows what my happen in the next 30 years.

Uncover Future Expats Forum for yourself

Image: Screen shot of Future Expats Forum website

I’ll be honest. I normally don’t go the speed limit on most highways. I usually try to stick with traffic or a little faster. Even with that admittance of guilt though, I also accept the fact that I’m speeding and if I get pulled over I deserve the ticket. I don’t use a radar detector.

That doesn’t mean I’m not aware of certain streets and areas where there’s normally a bit of extra police presence on the streets.

The Njection website provides a nice little speedtrap mashup map for cities all over the United States.

Red light cameras and speed traps are good ideas in theory, but not quite when put into practice. They have become a convenient and socially accepted way to fine drivers and increase local revenue while not actually enhancing road safety, as studies have shown. Article after article nationwide cites how red light cameras are used to increase the amount of money certain cities receive from fines, how well over half of certain towns’ operating budgets come from speeding tickets, and yet how particular kinds of accidents, such as rear-end crashes, actually increase regardless of speed traps.

I believe the greatest deterrent to speeding is a single police officer going 5 miles under the speed limit in the fast lane of a major highway. They can back up a line of traffic for miles. Similar to how Njection feels, not sure if that’s a better solution or not if safety is the ultimate motivation to reduce speeding though.

Uncover the risky areas in your town at NJection’s Speed Trap Mashup, but always drive safe!

It’s summertime. Has been now for a few weeks I guess but it’s finally kicking in that the kids are out of school for awhile and it’s time to start thinking about some weekend camping trips out of the city.

I came across the NationalParksOnline.net blog awhile back and have been enjoying the casual atmosphere of how Michael and Gabrielle share their experiences as they travel and enjoy America’s National parks systems.

Their journey was an amazing one and you can read their stories.

It seemed like a good time to become reacquainted with our country – its people, its history and its natural beauty. We lived just 10 minutes away from each other throughout our childhood but met in Wroclaw, Poland, a world away. Michael proposed on day three. Four years later we were happily married, and amazed at what we had yet to appreciate right here in the United States. After years of traveling and living overseas, it was time to fully experience all that our own country had to offer and to see what else we had missed.

Get out there and renew your awareness and love for this great country we live in, it’s the part that rarely makes it in the news, but the part that’s worth more than all the stuff we’re worried about right now.

Relax. Enjoy America.

I spend quite a bit of time on my couch. Not necessarily a couch potato, but hanging out with the kids, getting computer work done, client work done, catching up on our favorite shows. With all that, to think I could have been using my couch for more  helpful activities for others with CouchSurfing.org.

The CouchSurfing website gives you the opportunity to both see the country and help others see the country as well, without spending a fortune on lodging along the way.

As a community we strive to do our individual and collective parts to make the world a better place, and we believe that the surfing of couches is a means to accomplish this goal. CouchSurfing isn’t about the furniture- it’s not just about finding free accommodations around the world- it’s about participating in creating a better world. We strive to make a better world by opening our homes, our hearts, and our lives. We open our minds and welcome the knowledge that cultural exchange makes available. We create deep and meaningful connections that cross oceans, continents and cultures. CouchSurfing wants to change not only the way we travel, but how we relate to the world!

What a great concept, but a challenging one perhaps to work through with regards to personal safety and security. The question is, do you think everyone out there is a wacko? If so, then everyone thinks that about you right? We know that’s not true, so what do you think about CouchSurfing? Would you do it? Let me know.

Following in my recent pattern of covering websites that are resources or may interest travelers. The Chokti website provides another social network type site to get more people excited about travelling and sharing their stories with others when they get back home.

Chokti website

There’s an interesting bit of information to all of this that makes the Chokti website unique from it’s counterparts.

Most sites related to travel seem to focus too much on the process of travelling itself.

If you think about it, that’s the purpose of most sites, but that’s not really the main purpose of the Chokti website. Here are some of the bullet points that makes Chokti different.

• Promote the joy and excitement of learning about people and places. From your own neighborhood to the farthest reaches of the globe.
• Provide users with an easy and simple way of sharing their pearls of individual and collective knowledge from one person to the next.
• Give users immediate and pertinent results, through the Geotagging of all media content related to a physical place in the countries and territories we service.
• Allow users easy access to up-to-the-minute, relevant information through the latest internet-based technologies.

Get out there! Go somewhere and share your experiences about the people and places you see and not just the boring details of where you’ve been. Join the rest of the people around the world that love what you’re doing as well.

Share it at www.chokti.com

I spent around seven years in the travel industry as a corporate travel agent and somewhat quickly moved into being a technology manager for travel services. One of my responsibilities over those years was to design and manage internal travel websites for our corporate clients. The website shared information about preferred vendors for air, car rental and hotel information as well as travel policy and the other normal stuff.

TravBuddy website homepage

One thing I quickly realized in my experience with travel was that I didn’t have any desire to do leisure travel (although I always did dream or planning and organizing independent travel excursions to Africa for safaris and the like). Finding out information about destinations that you’re interested can be a challenge, and usually the best advice you get is when you can talk to someone that’s been there. I just helped a friend who had questions about their upcoming Disney trip to celebrate their daughter’s birthday.

The TravBuddy website has combined the best of sharing travel information and destination reviews with the tools and feature set of the current social networking sites that seem to be springing up everywhere. This is a great marriage of content and function in my opinion.

TravBuddy is a site for people who love to explore the world around them. You can use TravBuddy to find travel buddies, record travel experiences in travel blogs, or share travel tips with travel reviews.

No matter where you are exploring, we hope this site will make it easy and fun for you to chronicle your experiences, both past and present. We hope that it will also be an invaluable resource for keeping in contact with family and friends, and for making new friends from all around the world.

If you don’t already have an account, you can register for free or take a tour to learn more about the site.

– The TravBuddy Team

Now my only problem is figuring out how to get more time and money to actually travel around more than I do now, which is pretty much non-existent. The one thing I never took advantage of while in travel was actually traveling that much. However, the benefits aren’t exactly what you’ve probably heard or expect.

I spent a number of years in the travel industry and focused most of that time on researching, implementing and managing a variety of online booking tools that were used by corporate clients. I’ve now been out for a while but still hold a little bit of a special place for travel technology and related activities.

When I came across the Tripit website, my initial thought was that they were just another one in the plethora of travel related sites that all did just about the same thing.

The difference with Tripit though is they are not a travel booking site. Their primary goal is to help you organize your trip and itinerary and then share it with those people that you need to share your travel schedule.

Tripit turns chaos into order by making it easy for anyone to:

• Organize trip details into one master online itinerary — even if arrangements are booked at multiple travel sites
• Automatically include maps, directions and weather in their master itinerary
• Have the option to book restaurants, theatre tickets, activities and more right from within the online itinerary
• Safely access travel plans online, share them, check-in for flights, or print an itinerary

One of the frequently requested features of the online booking tools I managed was the additional of destination information, weather and other resources that made the trip easier, and all of which wasn’t dependent on what airline you’re flying or hotel you’re staying in for the night. This is information that’s always important, no matter where you go.

So, stop being disorganized and leaving people up in the air with when and where you’ll be arriving on your trip. Use Tripit to organize your upcoming travel.

Yapta is a website that lets you search for flights to take your next trip, and track them for future price changes before you confirm and purchase them. You don’t purchase the flights through Yapta, but they link you back to the airline’s or other seller’s website for the actual purchase.

Now they’re also having a contest through the end of the month for tracking flights and you can get up to 10 entries.

Yapta is proud to announce the “Track-A-Flight” Sweepstakes where you can win one of 20 prizes, including a $500 gift card to Marriott, a 1-year Clear Pass, the fast pass for airport security, or an Airport Lounge Day Pass, which provides access to over 500 airport VIP lounges across the world.  Becoming eligible for the Sweepstakes is easy.  All you have to do is visit Yapta.com during the month of October and track the airfare on any flight and Yapta will present you with the opportunity to participate.  You can increase your chances of winning by tracking up to 25 flights anytime between 10/1/08 and 10/31/08 to receive the maximum 25 entries into the sweepstakes.**

To find out more about Yapta and uncover some great deals, oh yeah and enter the sweepstakes visit their website by following the links below.

• Yapta website
• Yapta sweepstakes entry

Here’s an interesting website I just uncovered that might alleviate some of the $4/gallon gas pains everyone is having.

It’s called PickupPal and it connects drivers with passengers and packages. I’ve seen sites for carpooling and ride-sharing before but this is a bit of a new twist.

PickupPal’s core service is providing a venue for either passengers or packages to find or be matched to a driver—typically already travelling in a certain direction or destination—for a small commission. This intelligent matching is performed via our own proprietary set of software algorithms that dynamically and in real time compare routing, frequency, locational, and driver/passenger preferences against a pool of registered users.

This kind of service may have really come in handy for me a couple of years ago when I sold an antique silver chest on eBay and ended up driving it to Norfolk, VA myself because I didn’t quite trust any other shippers.

Would you use a service like this? What other similar services have you seen to compare it to out there?

www.pickuppal.com

When I bought my wife her laptop I wanted to make sure she had a good bag to go with it. I wanted a bag that gave her plenty of room for cords and accessories, while remaining stylish as well.

It’s too bad at that point I hadn’t heard of Mobile Edge.

They have bags and purses in loads of different styles and functions. They also have some nice accessories that would come in handy for people on the go as well.

Mobile Edge was created by a group of senior computer industry professionals for the sole purpose of producing superior computer-related carry cases. In this increasingly mobile world we live in, the case that you carry reflects upon who you are. Just as people are proud of the watch on their wrist, we want them to be proud of the case that they carry.

If all this wasn’t enough, you can also use the coupon code B5Media and receive 15% off your order. Now that’s a nice discount!

Save some money. Get a bag. Visit Mobile Edge now!