In 1998 my brother and I sat down and planned a web service which would allow travelers and writers to write journals and upload their photos whilst on the road. It would focus on simple image uploads, short chronological posts and then notifying your friends/family of new content through a subscription service. I wrote a functional prototype which included the ability to post/upload via email. We bought a domain and had plans to launch the service at some point. Looking back on this now, we had really started to develop a part of a rudimentary hosted blog service (chronologically arranged posts which facilitated discussion via comments) with elements of Flickr (image uploads and comments and social discovery of images uploaded near your current location) and the ease of use of Posterous (email all your content directly into the publishing system).
Beyond a working prototype we never pursued this in any serious way. Of course the execution is what matters and I think it's a failure that we never executed on this service to see if we could have created something that users adopted.
Blogs were around for a long time before they had a name. I started mine in 1998. We just called them "personal websites".
As to Travel Blogging, I actually implemented the grandparent's idea back in 2005, right when the Google Maps API became available. We just passed the 10,000 blog mark last month. Check it out:
When you say blogs were around for a long time, I know there must have been people publishing journal type sites, but what I think was key with blogger was that anybody, not just webmasters, could post frequently and effortlessly.
"Blogs were around for a long time before they had a name."
Exactly. We simply called this concept 'Travel Journals'.
The main obstacle we faced in 1998 was that most people didn't have digital cameras yet and the scanning and uploading of photos was a serious timesuck.
Beyond a working prototype we never pursued this in any serious way. Of course the execution is what matters and I think it's a failure that we never executed on this service to see if we could have created something that users adopted.