PlanetEye

April 3rd, 2008

Local blogs

Juan Gonzalez

Vice President, Technology

A couple of months ago I introduced our Local Expert Guides. So far there have been over 600 articles posted for cities like Berlin, Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, New Orleans, New York, San Diego, Sydney and many more. All these blogs have in common the fact that are written by passionate locals who do their best to share valuable information about their city. But perhaps one of the key features that they all share is the fact that they are geotagged. While the local blog or place blog format has been popular for quite some time, we are using a very unique approach allowing the bloggers to embed maps within the posts.

According to Placeblogger:

A placeblog is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time. It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution. It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism. It’s about the lived experience of a place 

In its original format local blogging demonstrated its effectiveness as a medium to cover remote regions not reachable by traditional media. Such has been the legacy of projects like Placeblogger and Global Voices Online. Now the format is growing in popularity as demonstrated by mainstream blogs such as Gothamist and LAist, but there is a definite need to improve the tools that allow bloggers to truly bind their stories to the place and we think PlanetEye offers a great feature set that not only attaches the blog to a city but allows every post to be geotagged and linked to an interactive map. The next step is to offer the discovery tools so the articles can be browsed and discovered like any other data point on the map.

Tags: local blog, placeblog

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