Well they always say that if you write a blog, it doesn’t matter what subject you theoretically focus on you will invariably just end up blogging about other blogs. So in the best traditions of blogging this blog is all about blogs.
Reading peoples reports of the geoblogger meetup at the UC this year and at where 2.0 got me wondering what would happen if you tried to do the same in the UK. The basic conclusion I came to was that there probably wouldnt be very many people turning up. Not because there are no blogs at all, but the few that there are cover an amazing diversity of subjects with not much overlap, and it would be hard to think of a UK event that would have more than a couple of people at. I guess the biggest traditional GI event would be the AGI conference in september but even then i’m not sure there would be many bloggers, there may be more at some of the opengeodata events, which seems to have a pretty vibrant community building up around it.
Its perfectly possible that I’m just not paying attention and there are hundreds of UK based geoblogs out there that i haven’t yet found. It may also be that blogs are not so popular in the UK, perhaps we prefer keeping ourselves to ourselves here. However there are a number of popular mail lists here that have quite vocal people on but not so many blogs.
Does it matter where bloggers are based? It seems like the majority of things that people talk about are technology based and have broad international appeal, so some of the blogs I’ve listed below you’d be hard pressed to know they were UK based, and I’m sure there are others that are UK based but no-one knows. I did find http://geoblogger.eu/ which has a good list of european blogs in many languages.
I’m sure there are plenty of subjects that are of interest to the UK only, both technology such as working with UK projections or UK specific Data and organisational or even just events information, but not many people post about these. Maybe there are not many people in the UK who read blogs for local GI news, I have to say that most of the comments I have had left or emailed on my blog have not been from the UK.
Anyway below is a short list of blogs that are uk based (i think) that could be called geoblogs. I’m sure people will point me at hundreds more, but this is a start.
http://bullsworld.blogspot.com/
http://kosmosofgis.wordpress.com/about/
August 17, 2006 at 1:00 am
Remember that “blog” stands for “web log.” A geospatial blog doesn’t have to be restricted to a service that can crank out RSS or ATOM. It can be a bulleting board, mailing list, or just a dumb website. Whatever the medium, I highly recommend that geographers from all sub-disciplines meetup at least every so often. It’s a great motivational force to get the innovation and collaborative juices flowing in our area of interest and study.
So, just do it, even if you think it is small. MeetUp.com seems to work well for communities of interest in the States.
(I errantly posted this comment to the previous post. Sorry.)
August 17, 2006 at 1:42 am
It just crossed my mind, but I’m sure Stanford’s would love to host a UK GeoBlogger’s meetup. I mean, since they’re in the biz?
August 19, 2006 at 10:56 am
[...] Dominic has a very interesting post over at geometrybag, noting the lack of UK centric content in the dozen or so UK based blogs that deal with Geography and GIS. Dominic is on to something here, there are many topics that are of interest to a UK specific readership beyond OS bashing of course , but maybe the point is that the technology issues we deal with are global ? [...]
December 31, 2008 at 11:59 am
Hi,
I am new to this blogging, but is it not the same as a journal or personal diary shared with who ever will take time to read, or is it my age and i am missing something