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A travel journal, or road journal or travelogue, is an initially blank book carried by a traveler for the purpose of documenting a journey. Clippings, tokens, or tickets may be included as they are collected. The journal may also include notes written by acquaintances. Some journals feature hand-drawn illustrations, line drawings, or even watercolors, of friends and places. A travelogue may also contain details of bad experiences. Since the popularization of the World Wide Web, digital travel journals called travel blogs have become commonplace.

In the movie Dances with Wolves, Lieutenant John Dunbar keeps a journal to document his observations of American Indians. Jack Kerouac's On the Road is a stream of consciousness novel written largely as a travel journal based on the spontaneous road trips of Kerouac and his friends across mid-century America. Jonathan Swift's 1726 Gulliver's Travels is a satirical novel parodying the "travellers' tales" literary sub-genre that was immensely popular at that time. Geoffrey Chaucer's 14th century The Canterbury Tales, mostly a collection of unrelated stories, is interspersed with details of a group pilgrimage from Southwark to Canterbury.

Online travelogues are travel diaries or journals featuring detailed descriptions of the travels of ordinary netizens. They are often called travel blogs, with the word "blog" being a contracted form of "web log." Travelers often share photos, write stories, and update family and friends on their location from around the world. They are often composed and published while their authors are still traveling, using public Internet stations and laptops. Content can often be toggled between being public or private, depending on the level of privacy required, and whether the user would like the information available for public searching. Mapping functionality can also outline a trip and offer a graphic visualisation of how the trip was undertaken.

Many websites now offer free or cheap travel blogs where travellers can upload photos and map their trips as well as meet other travellers. Popular sites such as TravelBlog.org, Travelpod, Trippert.com, Footstops.com, TravBuddy.com, Travelpost.com, GoAbroad.net, Realtravel.com and Travellerspoint allow users to display their experiences with little or no technical expertise while keeping an archive of all their past trips. Many travel blog websites also publish articles and guides focusing on travel related issues.

Travel blogs provide a platform for researching destinations as they offer real-world travel experiences undertaken by individual travellers and offer a focused and interactive way of sharing travel experiences within the framework of a like-minded travel community.

One of the web's first online diaries was "A Hypertext Journal" (1996) by artists Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope, who followed the route of 18th century travellers Boswell & Johnson's "Tour of the Western Isles" whilst responding to ongoing requests and interactions with their remote online audience.

• Travel literature
• Travel survey
• Traffic reporting

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