If you don’t have a Travel Journal yet, you might like to see how other people are using theirs. You can now browse travel journals to see what people around the world are publishing for public viewing. If the entries are set for family and friend viewing you need to have a visitor password to see them.

We’ve made a video to tell you all about the SIMple calling service. In Portuguese.

If you’ve linked your travel journal to Twitter or Facebook, you might like to follow ekit or Travel Journal on Twitter, or search for the “ekit” and “ekit travel journal” pages on Facebook.

Andy Pag and his team are attempting to drive around the world emitting less than two tonnes of CO2. You can follow the trip on their travel journal.

Follow the Biotruck across the world

The Travel Journal now offers many different ways to share your trip with your friends and family. Simply add their email address when you buy your SIM, or login to your Travel Journal and choose “share with friends” under the “friends” menu.

If you’d like your friends to be notified when you update your journal, you can do that too by choosing “send notifications” from the “friends” menu. You can configure how often an email will be sent to each friend.

If you’re on Facebook you can set up your journal to send updates to your wall so all your Facebook friends can follow your trip. There’s a little box that shows on your profile too that shows your last location and has links so your friends can jump into your Travel Journal.

You can also send your SMS updates to Twitter. To set up Facebook or Twitter updates, log in to your Travel Journal and click on the Facebook or Twitter icon on the account status box.

The ekit Travel Journal is a great way to share your trip but it’s even better to be able to hear from friends and family while you’re travelling. Friends and family have been able to leave comments in your journal, but you might not see them if you don’t visit the web site.  To help travellers better stay in touch with friends and family we have introduced some new features.

• You can now receive SMS notifications on your phone when someone leaves a comment. The text message will contain the first 120 characters of the comment and if it’s longer you can go to the web site to see the rest.
• friends and family can send you public or private messages. Private messages are just sent as an SMS to your phone. Public messages are added to your Message Stream where your friends and family can see them and a notification is sent to your phone.
• Your journal now has a Message Stream which contains messages you have sent, messages you have received, and comments. You can see all the messages, but friends and family can only see public messages and comments.
• You can reply to message and comment notifications from your phone and the reply is added to your Message stream.

The Messages page is an activity stream (a bit like the news feed in facebook) which shows messages and comments in date order. So if someone adds a comment to one of your entries, even if the entry was made two weeks ago, it will appear at the top of the message list. This makes it easier for you to see recent comments and messages and reply to them.

When a you receive a notification of a comment or public message, the SMS is sent from a number like +6001. You can reply to the SMS and, when we receive it, we link it to the associated comment or message. In other words, a friend comments on your journal, you receive an SMS with a snippet of the comment, and when you reply it is added as another comment on that journal entry. How easy is that?

One of the most requested improvements we have had is to make it easier to add photos. Recently we have added a number of improvements which help in this area.

When you edit and entry to add photos to a post, you can now add several at once. You select the photo to add and press the “add image” button and while it uploads you can select another, and another.

If you use a service like Flickr or Photobucket to store your photos, you can now just add a link to your photo and it will be displayed in your journal. This means you can avoid uploading the same photo more than once.

If you want to send photos from your phone, you can now email them into your travel journal. You need to have data enabled on your phone and email set up. Then visit your Travel Journal to get your unique email address (so only you can add photos), add it to your address book,  and you can snap a shot with your phone and send it into your journal.

ekit is demonstrating the Travel Journal at PhoCusWright in Hollywood November 17-20. There is lots of twittering from the conference.

CEO John Diamond and COO Andrew MacDonald are interviewed at the conference:

So you have a shiny new mobile phone that lets you read your email and browse the web and you take it overseas with you. But when you get home you get hit with a phone bill that costs more that your entire trip, in fact you could buy a new car as well and still have change.

Sadly, this is not uncommon so we have introduced pre-paid roaming data for all our global SIMs. Pre-paid data means that you never get a nasty surprise – we make sure you can’t spend more than than your credit balance and cut off the data when your balance reaches zero. Then you can decide if you want to spend more, or not.

We continue to roll out new features and improvements to the Travel Journal based on our road map and feedback from customers.

We have improved the entry editor with a much easier location editor. You can now search for a location by name, or click on a map to set your location.

Our cell tracking and mapping has also been greatly improved and now the majority of phone activities will get mapped to a location – generally at the level of a small town or a suburb.

We have also added points of interest which cover areas such as cities so when your friends see that you are in “Quartiere Otto, Italy” they can see that you are in Milan. We are using these points of interest to better match photos to posts and provide links to information about those places.

We have also made it easier to reply to text messages that friends send from the web site. Now friends can enter their mobile phone number and the text message will appear on your phone with the sender set to their number.