I wonder if that is what makes us so fussy and impatient when it comes to the rare occasion - such as getting on a plane - when we have to leave the controls to someone else and are at the mercy of forces (other humans) who haven't been bookmarked in advance.

This holiday season we're going to hear endless stories of travel nightmares from our families, friends and the press. So I'll start with a contrarian statement: Air travel is in fact as comfortable and reasonable today as it's ever been.

Travel blogging is becoming popular with both those documenting their travels and those who want to sample foreign countries before they set off. Newcomer Trippert, based in Palo Alto, doesn't want to be a totally open travel blog platform: instead, they're focused on users offering expert travel guides, with more focus on timeless content than the passing observations of travel bloggers.

Tagging makes articles easier to find, and profile pages aggregate your articles in reverse chronological order: it's essentially a blog. Users can also write articles together in a wiki format. For us geeks: RSS feeds of a writer's posts.

This Just In began April 12, 2007. The blog offers timely insights and practical tips for budget-conscious leisure travelers. Editors from Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel magazine and BudgetTravelOnline.com weigh in every day. Readers are encouraged to post comments.

If you have a holiday travel horror story, this is the place to discuss it. Every year during the holiday season, travelers gear up to enjoy some of the worst experiences the airlines have to offer. Yet year after year, nothing ever seems to change. Perhaps it's because they aren't held accountable, or because airline travel is a necessity. But perhaps it's because they just never hear about it! After all, who wants to spend 4 hours on the phone complaining to an airline voice-mail after you just spent 4 hours waiting for your bags?! What a headache. Skip that mess, and instead kick back with a nice glass of eggnog and let the whole wide web community share your pain.

Well, the eye of the travel hurricane is above most of us. We at Aircomplane.com hope you are all safely where you're supposed to be. The storm returns to shore Sunday when we all begin to return, and we look forward to hearing from you (and helping when we can), then.

Every Wal-Mart employee that Laura and Jim run into, from store clerks to photogenic executives, absolutely loves to work at the store. Sound like a great Wal-Mart publicity campaign? Anyone familiar with Wal-Mart and its reputation for being quite stingy with wages and benefits will roll their eyes at such a rosy picture. In fact, some critics are so skeptical that they wonder whether Jim and Laura are real or whether they were concocted at the company's headquarters in Bentonville, Ark.

"Wal-Mart has hired fake people," says Jonathan Rees, a labor historian and associate professor at Colorado State University at Pueblo, who has also worked as a staff researcher at the AFL-CIO. In a blog posting for the Web site The Writing On the Wal, Reese published an open letter to Laura and Jim challenging them to reveal themselves and asking who paid for their RV and gas.

In spite of the ever growing echochamber the blogosphere lives in, it never astounds me what gets missed from time to time; in particular, there's a leading story in Businessweek about how a travel blog about Wal-mart (that is unabashedly positive about Wal-Mart), has in fact been sponsored by Working Families for Wal-Mart. What's wrong with that? Well, it turns out that WFWM is an organization that was launched by Edelman about 10 months ago, as a PR move to counter negative press about Wal-Mart.

Even these personal attacks won't sour my feelings about Wal-Mart. I've met too many great people in Wal-Marts across the county. I've met too many people - real people, not imaginary Internet people - who've told me about all the good Wal-Mart has done. I've camped in Wal-Mart parking lots. I've met these people and heard their stories firsthand. Which is something the people who attacked Jim and me haven't done and don't care to do.

So I've made the trip. I had a great time. I loved meeting the people we met, listening to the stories we heard. After everything that's happened, I even loved blogging about it all. And if I had the chance, I'd do it again.

In the end, that's all that really matters.

An Internet search for full-time business travelers who write Web logs produces astonishingly low numbers, considering the eight million Americans whom the Pew Internet and American Life Project say publish a blog.

But that appears to be changing. "Just wait," said Steve Broback, a business traveler in Woodinville, Wash., who edits the new blog Inflighthq (www.inflighthq.com) and is an organizer of a blog conference called the Blog Business Summit. "The rush is starting."

Mr. Broback, whose Web journal is sponsored by Connexion, Boeing's wireless division, writes about the plight of the road warrior and offers links to news for business travelers. And he expects a lot of company soon. "In a year or two we'll probably even have blogs focusing on vintage airport vending machines," he predicted.

One business travel blogger noted that after her colleagues began reading her posts about being homeless after Hurricane Katrina, she felt she lost her anonymity. Her quote: "When your boss is reading your blog, you say to yourself, 'Well, maybe I shouldn't be writing about staying at the Ritz-Carlton.'" Another reason business travelers should be wary to blog: competitive intelligence. A blogging specialist in the article noted that business travelers who mention cities they're staying in or about to visit could reveal "enough information for a competitor to surmise what's going on."

Reading an online travel blog will perhaps never have the romance of receiving a dog-eared postcard in the mail, but intrepid travelers armed with digital cameras are finding that keeping a blog on the road can be a compelling and viable way of maintaining contact with friends and family.

A travel blog is a real-time online journal that allows users to post text and photographs to the Internet and share the Web address with whomever they want. As travelers have become more comfortable with the Internet and digital cameras have become more affordable, blogging has become increasingly practical and popular. All over the world, travelers can stop in an Internet cafe, upload their photos and share them with friends and family (and interested strangers) instantly.