In 1982, I spent the fall of my junior year at Colgate University on a study abroad program in Yugoslavia. That was two years after the death of Josip Broz Tito, two years prior to the Winter Olympics in Sarajevo, and a decade before the country's total collapse. It was an incredible time, and that four-month journey was one of the most influential experiences of my life. Like most of the students on that trip, I kept a personal journal and took roll after roll after roll of photographs, with many pictures of landmarks that no longer exist. Today, the journal is in my attic, and I haven't seen the photographs—which were taken with slide film—in several years.

Fast forward 18 years to the year 2000, when some very close friends took their family to Portugal for twelve months. During that year, they sent their friends and families periodic emails detailing their adventures. Those emails, however, now are lost in various in-boxes or deleted entirely. And, of course, we had to wait until they came home to see their photographs, which then lacked the context that would have existed had they been accompanied by the text of the emails.

Finally, in 2004, the son of a close friend was traveling to Spain for a one-year study-abroad program. My friend lamented the fact that his son wanted to keep an on-line journal and photo album but there did not seem to be any good options. So, we spent a year building and testing jotaway, an on-line journal tool that would allow individuals to keep a journal from anywhere in the world with access to the Web.

While building jotaway, the goal has been to develop a user-friendly program that will let anyone create a journal, describe events, document a journey, add photographs, or just record personal thoughts. Journals can be shared or kept completely private. How it is used is up to each journal's author. However, in the end, I want my friend's son to be able to come back to jotaway twenty years later and read his own account of his trip to Spain, revisit the photographs, and re-live the memories.

Jotaway is being improved continuously, as we hear from journal authors as to what they would like to see it do. If you have any suggestions or comments regarding jotaway, please let us know.

Happy journaling,


Tim Brooks