Blogalicious

These days, staying in touch with family and friends back home or spread out across your numerous vagabonding locations is both easier and harder. It's harder because, thanks to the incredible shrinking of the world, there are more and more people you can potentially vow to exchange email addresses with. Also harder because sending individual emails, calling everyone on their birthday (probably using Skype), and writing the occasional postcard can take up so much time that you don't do anything else.

Enter the travel blog.

A good travel blog doesn't spend each entry detailing "first we went here and did this..." Good, entertaining writing with a personal touch is important for your readers, who want to know how you are, not what you ate for breakfast. However, resist the urge to bare your deepest secrets on the internet, even in "friends only" posts -- the marvels of technology mean that every word you type will be available for your great-grandchildren to read a hundred years from now (unless civilization as we know it collapses!). Do you want to blog just for friends or are you trying to work your blog into a business or larger readership? It will affect what you write about and how often you post.

So what blogging tools should you use?

Livejournal: Accounts area available at a Basic level (free) and a Paid level. Some services (unlimited media upload) are often only available to paid members. They have recently teamed up with Photobucket to allow users to upload pictures already online. Limited offline update software for Mac users. You can also create communities, which turns it into a networking site.

Blogger: This has all the wizardy products that Google can bring you, including Google Gadgets and easily understandable interfaces. Blogs are limited to five images per entry, but will accept free video embedding (from YouTube, e.g.) and offer an HTML editing option. Easily customizable. Offline software available, and photo-uploading from Picasa. Note: your blog address will be youraddress.blogspot.com, not youraddress.blogger.com.

Diaryland: Has an excellent "levels of privacy" option that allows you to control pretty tightly who can and can't see your blog (good for posting about that drunken rampage in Thailand). They were the biggest online diary site once upon a time, with the most cool stuff, but many of the other blog sites have surpassed them in features since then.

Myspace blogging: Used to be a networking site for young folks (16-24), who have since moved on to Facebook. It is difficult to use, encourages media-heavy posts and pages, but is totally free and allows you to post whatever you want. Nobody can read your blog unless they are a Myspace member, though.

Moveable Type: This is an open-source software that allows you to edit and post to any website address (e.g. mytravelblog.com). It's awesome.