Could Ya Pencil Me In?

Hand-Made Mac Tip No. 4
Travel & Trip Blogging using Social Networking Service: Dopplr






Before we left for our trip, I started organizing some of the trip details with a social networking tool called Dopplr. I even made some journal notes in it recently. (Thanks to fellow MomsGoneGeek co-host, GeekyCyberMom for turning me on to this service.)

I suppose you might have to have an account to view it, but above is a blog widget to show you a preview. It also has links to photos on my Flickr account in some of the individual trip details. (although, you know me, I wish it were my Picasa account instead.) Some of the pictures associated with the trip are off, but I suspect it's just syncing the dates in the XML data of the photos.

I do like how you can subscribe to it (as well as others' Dopplrs you socialize with) and sync it with iCal. You can enter details and they appear in the notes section of each iCal entry.

I just wish you could tweak it a little further to specify trip names and detailed times so I could really use it as a public calendar to schedule events and trips. Instead of just saying "In Philadelphia" I'd like it to say "Playdate with Triplets." I'd also like to specify a time as opposed to an all day event when it might not be an entire day trip. I can at least do that in the notes section, but you know scatterbrained moms like me like to have alarms to remember stuff. My iCal is my other brain. I'd be lost without it.


Let me know what you think of this tool. (Leave me a comment.) I would be especially interested if you have any other tips on some good traveling tools like this that might be more open for family and friends who might be opposed to signing up for some service they might never use. That's one beef I always have with services.

I realize that this isn't truly Dopplr's intended use, but it's got great potential. Isn't that what we moms do anyhow? Foster great potential?

Just saying.

Happy travels to you :)