On September 8th, Dustin Curtis & Alaska Miller took off on a 30-day super trip. See, JetBlue airlines recently sold All-You-Can-Jet passes for unlimited travel between September 8th and October 8th.

Curtis, a user interface designer, and Miller, a web entrepreneur and writer, purchased these passes for $599, with the plan to visit every JetBlue-served US city in the 30-day span (a feat that will require approximately 90 flights). This may have been far less notable if the two simply went on this adventure and told their closest family and friends about it. But, that’s not what they’re doing.

Instead, they’ve put together a website, 30dayflight.com, to track exactly where they travel each day and some of the interesting characters and happenings they encounter along the way. Fourteen days in, they’ve maintained the blog and the graphical representations of their flights; they are still going strong.

While the 30-day-flight is a unique idea, other people are documenting travel online daily and always putting their personal touches on very public, widely-used sites. While many people start documenting their travel online to appease their ever-curious friends and families, some refrain from making their blogs and online profiles private.

The Traditional

Okay, it still feels kind of weird to call a blog traditional - after all, blogs are still a relatively modern development - but in the realm of online travel content, it’s as simple as they come. Sites like Tumblr, WordPress, and Blogger allow users to write entries and post pictures and videos in a simple format.

Charity Lake, a 25-year-old traveler extraordinaire from Orlando, FL is taking advantage of the options. A year ago, Lake moved to London, England for a work-abroad program and was faced with the daunting task of keeping all her friends and family updated on her travels.

“When I went to Alaska [previously], I did create a blog entry on MySpace about the trip and had a ridiculous amount of comments,” Lake says. “So I suppose that’s where I got the idea that other people are interested in hearing about my travel experiences.”

She kept up her blog throughout the seven months she lived in England and, after less than a year back at home, moved to New Zealand for another adventure - and another blog. Although Lake used to upload pictures of travels to Facebook and MySpace, and started out her London adventure sending personal e-mails aside from her blog, she quickly decided the blog was all she needed.

“After a few blog entries, I did way with the e-mails,” she says. “It was too time-consuming and people get enough e-mails a day. That’s why almost every entry I have has pictures. People really like pictures.”

As for being the blog reader rather than the writer, Lake’s all for it. “I love hearing other people’s travel stories, because that’s where I get my inspiration from,” she says. “People can give you a different perspective and a real-life story that a book or Wikipedia can’t give you. My friend is currently living in Mumbai and I get excited every time he sends out his monthly emails. It’s like stepping into a whole new world, or trying to imagine yourself in that person’s shoes.”

The All-Encompassing

These days, it’s not uncommon for a blog to be just one small part of someone’s online travel sharing, and there are plenty of sites out there. MyTripBook, WAYN, and Trazzler that cater specifically to travelers eager to elaborate.

Trazzler brings out the journalist in everyone, allowing all users to write short articles about specific hotspots, activities, and other trip tidbits, then “wishlist” other ideas they find on the site. WAYN users can adopt a Twitter mentality, posting short bits immediately about where they are and what they’re doing on their travels.

James Holmes, founder of MyTripBook, says about his idea, “I started to think about how the idea of social networking could be applied to other niches and realized the benefit this could have for sharing travel information.”

MyTripBook’s several thousand users write travel diaries, upload photos, and plan future trips, including booking places to stay through the site. They can also log-in via Facebook, and brag about all the fabulous places they’ve been through the Facebook newsfeed and maps function.

But Holmes says there are also those who may not care to divulge their own experiences but still enjoy learning about other travelers’ experiences. “It helps people gain a more personal perspective on different places, as opposed to just reading the same guidebooks,” he says.

The Very High-Tech

For some, perhaps just telling people where they’ve gone isn’t enough–they prefer to show people, which is where the GPS comes into travel sharing.

EveryTrail is yet another user-generated travel site, but this one, according to their site, is “a global web 2.0 platform for geo-tagged content.” Users with GPS devices can link them to the site so, wherever they are in the world, it’ll be recorded online. They can then supplement their hi-tech maps with photos, descriptions, and advice to anyone following their journeys.

The slightly less savvy can track their trips with websites like VCarious, where they can use the “Visuals” function to place photos on all the visited places on a map, or Google Latitude, which allows users to keep track of others’ on their computers and phones.

With all these digital options for travel sharing, it may seem tangible that travel diaries and photo albums are falling by the wayside. Holmes doesn’t think they’ll become obsolete, but does think the Internet options are far easier - many sites encourage users to print their journals and photos to get the best of both worlds. Lake is on board with that idea, kind of.

“I really want to print out the pages of my blog and create a scrapbook of my travels, but that just seems like a lot of work,” she says.

But it’s not just the convenience that draws people to these sites. Like Holmes says about MyTripBook, “From the beginning, the site has attracted people from many different countries. This is one of the things that makes working on an Internet project very exciting for me.” And it seems it’s part of what makes using his - and others’ - Internet projects exciting for them.