ABSTRACT
A large number of travel blogs are hosted on travel-specific websites sponsored by third-party advertising. For the most part, analyses of these blogs focus on the significance of a travel blogger’s identity as a consumer of tourism for the perceived credibility of a blog’s content and its promotion of various destinations (Banyai and Havitz 2013; Pühringer and Taylor 2008; Schmallegger and Carson 2008, p. 74; Wenger 2008). Little has been written about how the formal elements of blogs contribute to this online identity, how web hosts influence the different positions that an author occupies in the text – traveller or tourist, travel expert or tour guide – or the part played by discourses of travel and tourism. This chapter seeks to address this gap by exploring the concept that blogs are personal narratives whose formal features give some idea of an author’s online self, with respect to blogs hosted on travel-specific web hosts. Gérard Genette’s theory of paratexts (1997) provides a useful starting point for arriving at an understanding of how the content and other formal features provided by travel-specific web hosts and their sponsors complicates the identification of authorial voice and introduces discursive tensions in these narratives. It is employed here in the interrogation of a number of travel blogs on TravelBlog, TravelPod, and BootsnAll. Certainly, travel blogs may also be hosted, free of advertising, on blog hosting sites such as Blogger or Wordpress. However, the focus here is limited to those found on travel-specific web hosting services driven by advertising sponsorship, mainly to ascertain how web-host-provided paratextual elements combined with third-party advertising and user-generated text contributes to or detracts from the self-presentation of these travel bloggers.
