Twitchhiker: How one man travelled the world by Twitter
An exclusive extract from Twitchhiker, following one man’s travels from Newcastle to near-enough Campbell Island, New Zealand
Bored in the supermarket one day, Paul Smith wondered how far he could get in 30 days through the goodwill of users of social networking site Twitter. His first message went like this:
paul_a_smith Alright. Here we go. Everyone, I need your help on this. Please follow @twitchhiker, RT this message and read the blog at https://twitchhiker.com 12:25 PM Feb 2nd
Paul set his sights on reaching Campbell Island near New Zealand via Twitter – the opposite point of the planet to his home in Newcastle. He travelled by car, bus, boat, plane and train, slept in five-star luxury and no-star sofas, resorts to the hair of a dog in multiple time zones and schmoozes with Hollywood A-listers – all the while wearing the same pair of underpants. And when he got home, he wrote a book about it.
Tweet-speak
Twitter is a free website where people read and post little messages, sometimes called micro-blogging
Tweet
Tweets are up to 140 characters long and show on the owner’s profile page and on the pages of other Twitter users who have subscribed to get their messages
Followers
Twitter users who have subscribed to get other Twitter users’ messages are called followers
RT
RT stands for re-tweet. When someone repeats another twitter user’s message
Read on for an extract from Twitchhiker…
