Welcome to Social Media for Bored Travellers

Some people remember their freshman year of college for their first love, or the professor who blew their mind, or the book that changed their whole way of looking at the world. What I remember is the life-altering realization that I was now living in a building with a vending machine that provided 24/7 access to peanut M&Ms.

No wonder, then, that the dilemma of how to resist readily available M&Ms haunts me to this day. And when I saw the amount of traffic I got from a March 2010 blog post on 10 things to do in a hotel room other than eating the peanut M&Ms, I figured lots of other people might share this particular challenge. In the year after I wrote the post, it became the most frequently read post on my site (until finally getting bumped by 25 rules of social media netiquette).

But it didn’t take much in the way of analytics wizardry to realize that the popularity of this post wasn’t driven by fealty to the combination of chocolate, candy and legumes. The truth is that there seem to be an awful lot of bored people sitting in hotel rooms. Just take a look at the top 15 search strings in the search engine traffic to my site: 8 of them are people who are just desperately trying to escape the combination of a 22-channel universe and a polyester bedspread.

So to these noble, bored souls, let me offer a warmer welcome. That M&M blog post couldn’t have staved off boredom for more than about 2 minutes (2 minutes and 18 seconds, actually, according to Google Analytics’ “average time on page”). That’s why I’m rounding up some of the posts and resources that I think are most likely to interest the bored travellers of the world.

Start here: 10 Funny Things to Read or Do Online from a Hotel Room