ABSTRACT
Writing about online narratives, George Landow observes that ‘The edges of the blog, like the borders of any document on the Internet, are porous and provisional at best’ (2006, p. 82). This view still holds true for independently hosted travel blogs. Indeed, it is difficult to determine where the boundaries of these narratives lie, as they extend their descriptions of journey experiences to other online platforms such as social networking services, microblogging services, photosharing platforms, and video-sharing sites. For the most part, this involves linking with social networking site Facebook and microblogging service Twitter. In addition to this, many travel blogs also display a connection to image-sharing tools such as Instagram or Flickr, visual bookmarking service Pinterest and, in some cases, video-sharing platform YouTube. Such blogs may be easily described as possessing what Anne Helmond refers to as a ‘distributed nature’ (2010, p. 7). Generally, links to these other platforms are either embedded in the blog or accessed via a sidebar comprising buttons known as ‘widgets’1. This last usually graces the top of the home page of most of the travel blogs discussed in the previous chapter.
