Electronic Diary Advantages

Diaries, or journals, are written entries that track a person's thoughts and experiences. For many years, people have used pen and paper to keep a diary. With the advent of the Internet, however, came a new way to prepare a diary. You can now write and publish your thoughts in an electronic diary. There are several advantages of keeping an electronic diary, including privacy and security issues as well as ease of composition and editing.

You don't have to haul pen and paper or a diary book with you everywhere because an electronic diary can be updated from anywhere and at anytime, so long as you have access to the Internet, whether it's through a desktop, a laptop or even a smart phone.

Everything written on an electronic diary can be backed up so that you don't have to worry about losing your valuable entries. You can make a copy of your entries and store them on your hard drive, or you can e-mail the entries to yourself or store them on a flash drive.

A diary is designed to be viewed be just one person: you. An electronic diary, on the other hand, can be shared with as many people as you would like. You can limit access to just yourself, you can allow your friends and family access or you can make your diary available to the general public.

Inserting pictures into a traditional print diary can be very frustrating. You must either draw it by hand or cut it out from a magazine or other source and attach it to the page. With electronic diaries that are online, you can integrate your text with a plethora of online multimedia content, including pictures, animations and even advertisements.

Electronic diaries can be cross-referenced. If you write an entry about Christmas, for instance, and then later you write an entry about holidays in general, you can link the second article back to your original article. You can also link to outside sources like articles and encyclopedia entries.

Adjusting a typical diary requires scrubbing with an eraser --- assuming you used a pencil --- and then carefully writing a new entry. It's a tedious and time-consuming process. With an electronic diary, you need only select the text you want to delete, hit the delete button, and then type a new entry.