Don’t you just love the amount of interactivity on the web lately! We’re sharing all over the place. Sharing music, photos, lives, videos, everything we can find to share. To accommodate all this sharing are an increasing amount of social networks to do the job.

Sharing our trip is important to us. Not only because we like to claim bragging rights about something fabulous we are doing, but also because we want to use it as a learning tool for future ventures and hopefully contribute it to a book eventually.

So, obviously first off the rank was a mapping tool so we could plan our travel route. We first started using Yahoo Travel, and it has some fabulous features. You can search other users accommodation recommendations, places of interest they have found and you can share your trip experiences. While it’s itinerary system was good, it did lack a little continuity and user friendliness, but otherwise it was very helpful. You can either keep your planning private, or share it with the social network. Paul & I are planning our trip, with him in the UK & myself in Western Australia, so having a site where we could both contribute at the same time was awesome.

Where Yahoo did fall down was their mapping. Google Maps were a lot easier to use and plot our trip with. Street view proved awesome for deciding on which areas we should steer clear of, and which areas warranted a better look. Even though the maps are fairly out of date, you can figure out busy road systems and highways, and have a better view to plan alternative routes. We have spent months really finding out the power of Google maps, and we have only just scraped the surface. One other great feature of Google maps were user contribution for photos of places of interest. We added many ‘must see’ attractions from these map photos!

Next was to get photo sharing. Like everyone I have a Facebook account, but also like many others I have other photo-sharing sites I use. However, for our travels I will be using Flickr [I'm pretty sure Paul is too]. You will find the permanent link to my Flickr on the right hand column. If you are also following our travels through wwwTrek, you will see I am also feeding them through there.

Blogging about the trip is going to be a cool way to fill those relax hours, but what about those moments when you just need to tell the world something great you have seen. I am like that all the time! Poor Paul has had over 5 years of meaningless trivia about things I need to tell someone. So thank you Twitter! I’ll be aiming to make you all pea green with envy by twittering about the awesome adventures we’re going to have! [Terrible aren't I!] By feeding my Twitter account into my Facebook account, I am sure to reach everyone who might scold me if I don’t keep in touch!

So Mother, you are more likely to know I have been sold into slavery by reading my tweets, than you are by waiting by the telephone. “Help, I have been kidnapped” will get noticed much faster than any news service & is guaranteed to get a better response!

Once I figure out all this video editing software I will be sharing our travel videos also. However, at this stage I am still undecided between YouTube & Vimeo. I’ll get back to you on this one, as the jury is still out on it. Howevvver…. YouTube has been fantastic for finding language lessons! There are so many language and culture lessons on YouTube, I was most impressed. So while I still only know about 6 words in Spanish, I have the lessons bookmarked for learning on the run!

In the pipe works is bookmarking with delicious, and probably twitter video with Qik. However, at the moment we are a little snowed under with other priorities. But keep watching this space!