by admin | June 9th, 2008
The “Pink City” — Jaipur, India
Every traveler loves to look back at where they have been and what they have done. This posting discusses a site where the “amateur” OR “professional” traveler can go to simplify their record keeping of their journeys. For those who have an interest in becoming a travel writer, the featured site is a particularly good tool.
One of the first steps toward becoming a travel writer is keeping a journal or diary of your own travels. In the past, this could be a real problem. To keep your friends up to date, you had to write dozens of postcards, or send dozens or even hundreds of emails to keep everyone informed.
Usually, if you wanted to keep a journal or diary, you had to lug the diary or journal around with you. You had to try to take enough notes during the day to remember everything you did that day. I remember trying to keep up a journal in India as I bounced around on a train or a bus. That’s hard writing. At night, I would take time to write letters about all of the day’s events to several family members! Boy! Was that a lot of work!
Well, there had to be a better way! And there is! And I recently found it!
Globenotes.com is a service that is officially described as an “Online travel diary and photo hosting service plus an information resource for travelers”. Now, I said in this posting’s title that it was FREE. Well, it is and it isn’t. Like most companies, there is always a free abbreviated version that gets you hooked and then you go for the full version.
But first, a word of about it came to be. Peter Foran, Globenotes.Com’s creator created a website for himself where he could log his travel experiences , maps, and photos. He utilized this personal website while he traveled around the world for 16 months.
To make a long story short, his family and friends were so impressed that they wanted to know how they could get a similar website. So, upon his return from his trip in November of 2004, he created a user friendly version of his own web design so traveler’s could create their own diaries online.
The free version has 2 MB of storage space and holds up to 80 photos and unlimited journal entries. The free account can be upgraded at any time. The paid version is 300 MB of story, and due to special compression program, will hold up to 12,000 pictures. I don’t have that many. Do you?
Their price for the the paid account is 8 Euros for 6 months or 12 Euros for 1 year. (If you don’t know how much that is in dollars, you can check out the present currency exchange rate at the Currency Converter website). It is around $12.00/6 months and $18.00/year at the time of this writing.
So, if you want to have a good place to keep your journal while your traveling, try out the free version and see if you like it. For those who think they would like to become “travel writers”, this is a great place to start.
Happy traveling and happy writing.
