I’ve known Pam Mandel of Nerds Eye View for a couple of years, initially through the Blogher network for female bloggers. Pam recently started a forum for travel bloggers.

1 What is the aim of your blog?

My aim, first and foremost, is to tell good stories about travel. There’s a bunch of secondary stuff that includes photography, food, reviewing travel related gear, books, and odd little sidelines, but primarily, my blog is for storytelling.

2 What prompted you to start your blog?

I was at a swimming pool in Austria, watching it snow through the big glass windows. I wrapped myself in my towel, lay down on my (indoor) beach chair, and when I got up again, I had a fully written essay in my head. I rushed home to write it down and I haven’t stopped writing since. The less poetic truth is that I was a lonely expat and had a lot of time on my hands. But it was that first piece – one rather too long to be a good blog entry – that started the whole thing.

3 What has been the hardest aspect of having your blog?

There are a few things that are hard for me.

There’s the constant effort to not get swept up in the sense that I have to be a Famous Blogger Right Now! It’s hard not to be drawn in to the popularity contest mentality that permeates the blogosphere. I fight with that because, hello, of course I want to be a famous blogger, but I don’t want to be snippy about the fact that I’m not. And I don’t want to think that I deserve that. There are millions of blogs, after all, and lots of them are great. We can’t all have successful personal blogs that pay our bills, can we?

Increasingly, I struggle with how to maintain integrity when the PR agencies and providers want virtual ink on my blog. I love that commercial organizations think my opinion matters enough to all 212 of my readers that they want to send me stuff, but I don’t like feeling obligated to them because they’ve sent me stuff. I’m reading a review copy of a book right now that I don’t think very much of. I hate that I have to publish a bad review because I love that the publisher sent me the book. And sometimes I don’t get to writing about things in a timely manner and that makes me feel bad too – blogging isn’t my day job and things I would love to blog about get shelved for more critical, bill paying pursuits.

4 What is the funniest thing that has happened to you running your blog?

I have a category called “Fish Wednesday” where I write about seafood and seafood sustainability issues. When I went to BlogHer in Chicago, one of my readers asked me if I’d like to get together for dinner. I was psyched, she’s got a clever blog and a wicked sense of humor. I had no idea what she looked like but when I headed down to meet her in the hotel lobby, she was there holding a little sign that said “Fish Wednesday.” It was adorable.

Also, once, a piece I wrote about Arnold Schwarzenegger and Austria’s peculiar relationship with their famous son got picked up by a very conservative blogging network. Politically, I’m quite the lefty, so I thought it was pretty funny that they were so interested in what I was writing.

5 Is there anything you would do differently with the benefit of hindsight?

The things I have learned about blogging – technical, editorial, community oriented – have all been so driven by positive experience that I don’t think there’s one thing I’d change. The things that I tell beginning bloggers now – get your own domain, it costs, like, three dollars, use WordPress, it’s awesome, post personal stories that matter to you and everything else will follow, be really patient, a good blog doesn’t happen overnight, assume that everyone is reading – are lessons learned over the shockingly long amount of time I’ve been blogging. And if I were to go back and do things differently, I might have a different blog. I really like my blog as it is today. Changing the past would change what Nerd’s Eye View is now, and I don’t want to do that.

My comments – Pam, I haven’t really been bothered by the contest mentality in the travel blogosphere. I realised early on that not all popular travel blogs have great content, they are maybe part of a media group so have lots of links with no effort  and/or they’re good at SEO. It’s not that I consider myself as a great travel writer either my aim is to do something I love which informs and entertains people who love travel in Europe and make enough money to live on from that.  However trying to make even a modest living from a travel blog is hard. You don’t want to end up with dubious paid links and irrelevant, garish ads.