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Journal

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I have both kept a journal and written a blog for several years, but if I had to choose between them, then the journal wins every time. My journal is a travel journal in the sense that I take it with me when I travel, but then everyday I travel somewhere even if it's only to the bar village. I mention this to underline the huge benefit of a journal - I am writing this on a sunny morning in Umbria sitting at a table in the bar overlooking Lake Trasimeno - with a pen and a Moleskine I'm fully equipped. Yes I could do it with a laptop - if there was WiFi here, or I could type it up and then send it from an Internet cafe.

Yes but....... You see for me there are several issues. First of all there's the portability issue - yes laptops get smaller and lighter : batteries last longer but my Moleskines have never needed recharging and they have certainly never crashed!

The Moleskine is more immediate and varied. You can stick cards, pictures, receipts, tickets, whatever you want into a notebook. You could do it by scanning objects into a blog - but it 'takes you away from the moment'..... it distances you from the place that you actually are in! It's the same effect as those tourists who wander around with a camera glued to their eyes - recording acres of images to be looked at later. Why not enjoy the experience there and then?

This brings me to another point about enjoying the moment, there and then and later. I have twenty three Moleskines on my bookshelves full of notes, photos, sketches, tickets cards and memories. I often pick one out looking for something specific and having found it or not, find myself drawn into reliving a moment - the bar in Florence where I proposed to Lesley; the four hour Sunday lunch in Catania celebrating a young boy's first communion with his family, a gig in Paris. Which is more evocative? A blog? Or a journal filled with an assortment of objects and experiences - including the odd drops of wine!

Of course , the point that many will make is that a blog means that you can share your memories immediately with many other people. That is absolutely true : but do people really want to know every detail of every day of your travels? And if you want to share something special then why not take some blank cards and just write, draw, attach a ticket or anything relevant and send that? How much nicer and more personal!

Yes I have a blog which is based on my notebooks called really accessible memory. I don't update it every day: in fact I often don't update it for weeks. But the journal is with me every hour of every day. In fact, I'm beginning to doubt the use of blogs : Blogger and Wordpress publish 90,000,000 words a day! Yes you can reach a much bigger audience but there's as many people on the stage as there are in the audience. Since last year my journals have been featured in a Dutch arts paper called Zuiderlucht so I know they get seen by so many thousand people every month which is very satisfying to know... and they are real people not search engines....

Just a final thought on travel journals vs blogs check out www.xkcd.com/77
I think he got it dead right.

To put it another way: - LIVE WRITE NOW!

Learn more about this author, Rowland Jones.
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