Fifteen additional planes will offer wireless Internet service for laptops and PDAs beginning today for $12.95. Reports USA Today: “If the service is deemed successful after three to six months, American Airlines plans to roll out the service to the rest of its domestic fleet.” Yes, slowly but surely, airline by airline, plane by plane, we’re moving closer to a day when the sky is one big, happy internet cafe.

The service—for about $10—will begin on some flights next month and will be extended across the airline’s domestic fleet by next summer. Reports the Washington Post, “Delta appears to be the first U.S. airline to commit its entire fleet” to the technology. Go Delta. Now how about bringing back in-flight poetry?

In first and business classes, you’ll be able to charge the devices and watch videos on your in-flight entertainment screen, the airline announced. The first flight with the service—Washington, D.C., to Zurich—departed yesterday; the technology will be rolled out to other wide-body jets over the next two years. You still won’t be able to make calls.

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Sure, WiFi has arrived in airport lounges, hotel lobbies, and on some buses, but for the bandwidth-hungry traveler, there are still plenty of “those pesky dead zones between hotspots,” observes the Globe and Mail’s Denise Deveau. But she points out a couple of newer technologies that could see wireless networking capabilities expand dramatically --think rural areas and even oceans. Wireless internet access may not have the romance of poste restante, or the quirky charm of your local internet cafe, but it certainly makes for a shrinking planet.

Photo by hive via Flickr (Creative Commons)

Interesting example of how user-generated info and hand-held GPS devices are changing travel.

What’s it like to leave Lonely Planet at home and travel to Thailand guided only by resources on the Internet? It’s an interesting question, but the resulting Slate story by Tim Wu, unfortunately, poses more questions than it answers. “The Internet has long been terrible for travelers—full of sham sites designed to lure visitors to selected hotels, or, in Thailand’s case, go-go bars,” he writes. The Internet has long been terrible for travelers? Huh? 

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Why would a Vermont computer programmer wade into a leech-riddled swamp out in the middle of nowhere in Malaysia? To find the confluence of the 4th degree of latitude north and the 102nd meridian of longitude east, of course! If you’re confused, you’ve never heard of the Degree Confluence Project, the subject of a feature story in Thursday’s Los Angeles Times. (And you haven’t been dutifully clicking on our “Offbeat Sites” links; we posted a link to the project’s site ages ago.) Project devotees, many of whom are of a certain scientific persuasion, pack their hand-held global positioning satellite devices and wander off to find and photograph the intersection of whole number latitude and longitude points all over the planet, even in the middle of the ocean. Sure, David Lawrence, the programmer in question, could have simply opted for a tour of a Malaysian tea plantation. But what would be the point of that? “I have a wanderlust,” he says. “Yet traveling without a destination seems so random. This gives you a purpose.”