In 1997, I took the first trip that I actually tried to document and write about. I was a grad student, and I went to France with the other members of my research team to go to a research conference. I was also a relatively recent owner of a PalmPilot Pro, and so I furiously scribbled out a series of e-mail missives for later sending.

In 2001, I found the analog photos that I took of the trip, and finally put the e-mails & scanned images together into a Paris 1997 travelogue.

(The next big trip like this was Paris in 2005 with Carrie, but I phoned that one in a lot more, with just a few shots posted to my blog, apparently.)

The next whack I took at this was the Christmas 2008 trip to England. My approach this time was to take a large number of photos during the day, then upload & edit them that night, and make a coherent blog post for the day with -- usually -- no more than three photos as highlights. This shows up on the December 2008 and January 2009 archive pages of my blog, although, regrettably, the reverse chronological order suffers for later reading.

The trip to Hawaii we just returned from, on the other hand, has no tangible record, because I posted it mostly to Facebook, which is generally walled off. You can piece it together from my Facebook wall, since I generally don't use the privacy settings, but it's still not put together in any kind of coherent form.

Granularity and Community

Of the three, I think the first one stands up best as a piece of writing. Yes, I have ten years more experience under my belt now, but it was actually written to be read later. It probably tells the best story for someone who's interested in the trip after the fact.

On the other hand, the Facebook entries were the most satisfying for me. Since I was working from a facebook-enabled cameraphone, I felt like I could show interesting things as I encountered them, and getting comments as we explored gave me a real sense of remaining connected to community. I recognized that I was probably splatting out about twice as much information as people really cared about, but we were having fun and seeing interesting things, and I wanted to share that enthusiasm. In a very nerdy way, it was sort of like the kind of community I get from being in an MMO -- I can engage in my own activities, but I can share those activities and use it as a springboard for conversations.

By contrast, the blog entries generated almost no commentary, making them feel much more sterile to me. I got a sense of craftsman's pleasure from making them, but once they were out there, they already felt somewhat adrift and context-free.

Technology Evolution

Obviously, a number of these technologies have shifted on the spectrum: digital cameras have become portable and have great quality now. The very idea of being constantly connected to the network is plausible in a way it wasn't even a few years ago. And being able to take a picture and post it to Facebook from the open seas encourages both a spontaneity and a logorrhea that still demand a new kind of a writing style to be worked out. As I write this, I realize that I'd really love to have a good way to take snippets of writing that I'm -- for lack of a better word -- beta-ing on Facebook, and pull them back together into a narrative that stands alone.

The GPS angle is also somewhat interesting, although I rarely used Twitter to tell any of the most recent narrative, and Twitter has the most robust geolocation. I used Gowalla to some extent, but I have the suspicion that people either find geo-social-blah-blah either fascinating or incredibly boring, and there's almost no in-between. I also messed around with an app called "Trip Journal," which tries to produce a map of your journey along with associated pictures. It's reasonably well done, but in the end it was too much of a hassle (and too much of a battery drain), and the options for getting the story out of the app didn't really fit my needs.

I'm curious to hear others' reactions to these different forms of storytelling. Is it interesting? At what point does it become too much? What ways do you document & retell your stories and adventures as or after they happen?

In Conclusion...

...here are some badass pictures of humpback whales that I took: