My Trip Journal: Free Online Travel Diary & Photo Hosting

"MyTripJournal's platform has been called a 'travel blog on steroids'.

"There are a number of key differences between a travel blog and a Personal Travel Website. First and foremost, while a blog is maintained for the purpose of recording opinions and thoughts, Personal Travel Websites are focused on recording the user's experiences. This is made possible through a number of tools which allow your trip to be shared with others and preserved for posterity."

"The mapping system distinguishes Personal Travel Websites from travel blogs by allowing travelers and their visitors to focus on what separates travel from all other endeavours: the places you've been and seen. Users are encouraged to add links to multiple maps and to customize those maps to focus on their own experiences. One view of any of the samples shows how this map-driven focus differs starkly from a travel blog."

"There are also a number of archiving features not normally associated with blogging. Rather than simply maintaining your travel blog on someone else's servers, all standard and premium customers may download an html copy of their entire site to view on their local hard drive or posted to a personal webpage. Unlike with most travel blog systems which will immediately reduce photo images to what's needed to show on a computer screen, the photos loaded in a Personal Travel Website will be stored in their original resolution so that they may be accessed for printing later on."

"The traveler-focused system deals with users according to their own experiences, rather than on programming terms as with travel blog systems. The places traveled are mapped specifically for the user's own trip and no-one else's. Image limits are not counted by the megabyte but by number of photos."

"Traditional Travel Journals were created in scrapbooks. You'd write out stories about your travels, paste in photos, often including some maps of where you've been with your route traced out.

Personal Travel Websites were created by MyTripJournal to enable you to do the very same thing in an ad-free, online environment. The added bonus is that your friends don't have to invite themselves over for dinner to see your travel journal ... they can now follow in your footsteps as you go!

"Click one of the free journal links and you'll arrive at the set-up wizard. A few steps later you'll be setting your welcome message and photo, choosing which maps you want to start with, and entering some sample text and photos. Check out the guestbook and friends' update notice features. Take the Guided Tour and learn all the basics in just 6 minutes. Later, you can explore the travel journal archiving options such as free downloads and storage of all your original-quality photos."