A friend of mine asked me recently: But… why post things to the internet? I originally answered this question with a simple “because I want to document my experience.” That doesn’t really answer the core question. Not why I want to post things, but why to the internet? So, how does one answer that? I think that’s an important thing to define and it kind of sets the tone.

I think the answer lies in how I look at the internet: It’s a collection of knowledge and experiences of vast amounts of people. Google has been the gateway to this database of human knowledge and it’s allowed me to be able to find the answers I need; or, at the very least, the key points I needed in order to find the answer.

At work, I really put emphasis on documentation as much as I can. As I figure things out and implement things, I want to document my design decisions and how I solved certain problems. This allows myself and others to easily solve the same problem if it’s encountered again, or quickly overcome a similar problem.

So, my original answer to that question is still the core of my answer: As I work on projects and figure out solutions, I want to document them. This is partially going to be my own personal story-like Wikipedia. There’s so many times I’ve used other people’s blogs and such to solve a problem, I hope that I can be that person for at least one other person. The only way to really do that is to make sure these aren’t just posted to my own local server’s wiki, but on something that’s available to the world.

Now, then why would I care to do this for my travels? It seems silly because sometimes travel experiences are personal and not exactly universally applicable like factual knowledge. However, I believe that the same thought applies as to other documentation. If someone stumbles upon this in Google and figures out they want to go someplace because they didn’t know about it, or not waste their time in some place I did, then I’ve helped them in some way.

Helping someone out with the knowledge I have is what I hope to do with this site – making some sort of difference in their lives. Maybe it’s not as “grand” as people think when they hear “make a difference,” but I feel that it’s valuable nonetheless.