Core Blogs… Update

Back in December I posted about “Core Blogs, Aggregators and Blog Content Stealing.” In it I tried to rationalize how people, including myself, use different sorts of blogs. I want to update that as my habits suggest that I’ve changed my tune.

I wrote: “I read lots of GIS blogs. I don’t spend much time reading the aggregators (SlashGeo/Planet Geospatial) because I’ve already culled out the best blogs for me and don’t need their help.” Well, that’s no longer true. I do need Planet Geospatial’s help. In fact, I use it as a key resource in part to be sure I don’t repeat what others have already covered.

A side note: I have to give the GIS blogging community a lot of credit; it does a great job on not simply re-reporting on content from others. There are a few now and then, but the repeaters are fewer and fewer all the time. I solved this with our “other points” list of posts on the right hand side of our main page. Those are the other posts that I think are worthy of your attention. Said another way: That’s stuff I’d have written about, if I found it first. I update the list daily.

The other reason Planet Geospatial is important hit me just this week courtesy of David Pogue and his interview with Anna Marie Cox formerly author of the Wonkette blog. She’s not a tech blogger, but highlights how, at least in the past, a blogger needed to have a personality. That’s changing, she says.

And so I think that we’re probably going to see that the individual, strong-personality blog is not going to be at the forefront, because group blogs are going to be able to do what people expect of blogs better [rapid update].

And, if you look at Planet Geospatial, that’s what we have - a group blog created from lots of individual blogs. The only difference, and this is where SlashGeo hopes to help out, is putting all the comments in one place.

The other part of the story, of course, is that we bloggers have different interests, different sources and different time zones. That means there is stuff on Planet Geospatial I’d never find simply because I don’t travel in the same circles as say Sean Gilles. And, I love that when I get up here on the east coast, the Europeans have all new stuff for me to read.

The state of the geospatial blogosphere is sound and we are happy to be a part of it.