January 2nd, 2007

Filed under:
About This Site, Blogosphere, Vancouver
4 Comments »

Is this a Placeblog?

Placeblogger launched today, hosted by our good friends at Bryght. It’s a kind of network of placeblogs. What’s a placeblog?

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.

Placeblogs are sometimes called “hyperlocal sites” because some of them focus on news events and items that cover a particular neighborhood in great detail — and in particular, places that might be too physically small or sparsely populated to attract much traditional media coverage. Because of this, many people have associated them with the term “citizen journalism,” or journalism done by non-journalists.

I don’t think this site is a placeblog. I write about Vancouver regularly, but it’s only a subset of what I usually cover. I suppose this category page on Vancouver is kind of a placeblog, but I’m not sure it’s kosher to submit a chunk of your blog to this site.

Kitsilano.ca, on the other hand, is definitely a placeblog.

Comments: 4 Responses so far

Lisa Williams
January 2nd, 2007
10:11 am

Hi, Darren, it’s Lisa from Placeblogger.

That’s a good question. Do you want to be a test case? Let’s try it.

Ultimately I hope we get to the point where there’s an open and widely adopted standard for bloggers to geotag — that’s also easy to use. Then we could get down to a much finer granularity.

Obviously, Placeblogger isn’t there yet — I’m putting out what I’ve got now in the hope that people will find it useful, and keep putting one foot in front of the other from there.

[Reply]

darren
January 2nd, 2007
10:57 am

Fair enough, I’ve added my Vancouver feed.

[Reply]

Andrea Coutu
January 2nd, 2007
10:22 pm

I felt they didn’t do a very good job of explaining where to add your feed or URL. And there’s no way to go back and add it after you miss it.

[Reply]

darren
January 2nd, 2007
10:41 pm

Andrea: I agree. I had a hard time finding the ‘add a feed’ link on the home page (it’s located, relatively speaking, in a low scanning zone). I only knew to click the ‘Feed information’ link because I use Drupal sites a lot.

[Reply]

bob ashley
January 5th, 2007
11:29 pm

A little irony. Perhaps you’re not a ‘placeblog’ but I have yours filed in my Google Reader under “Canada”.

I’m not so sure that a perception of quantitative place coverage matters to your audience as much as place connection.

So, and in a sorta inverse sort of quantitative/quantitative shuffle, while I live on the east coast, pretty close to the “Boston” states, my Canadian gut tells me that as an audience I have a much closer connection with a guy like you on the west coast.

Identity, whether or not yours is a place blog, is not so much measured by degree, as classified by ‘kind’.

Nice blog.

bob

[Reply]

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