As the online and offline worlds converge, geographic location technology is getting hotter everyday. From lightweight consumer apps like Foursquare and Yelp to big enterprise and open source applications, place data is enriching the internet and the internet is enriching the way we experience the offline places we go. This is a super-hot field of technology right now and it’s hard to keep track of all the daily developments.
Bloggers to the rescue! Fortunately, thinkers, doers and companies in this market are writing blogs about geo technology every day. We’ve compiled a list of 300 of these blogs so far and you can find them listed below. (My wife said I shouldn’t say 300 in the headline, as 300 sounds overwhelming!) They are ranked, too: we ran the blogs through Postrank, a service that scores the blogs by social media engagement. The blogs are ranked in order of the number of comments their posts are getting, inbound links from other blogs, mentions on Twitter, bookmarks on Delicious and much more. Read on to see who wrote the hottest blog in geo this week.
Update! Chris Thompson, blogger at independent Foursquare-tracking blog AboutFoursquare.com emailed to point out that his blog wasn’t included in our list! I must confess, I read his blog all the time and felt pretty silly about that. I felt even sillier when I added his site to the index and found out that it is in fact the reigning champion!
Congratulations to the independent map-collecting blog Google Maps Mania for winning the [second to] top spot this week. It’s written by freelance London designer Keir Clarke and is a super fun blog to read. Clarke took over from blog founder Mike Pegg in 2008 when Pegg was hired by Google.
Congrats also to the Paris, Dublin and Norwich based blog GeoGraphika for making a giant leap from #166 last week to #8 this week!
Is your blog or your company’s blog about geo technology and not included on this giant list? (Control-F will let you find by title if it’s there.) If you’d like to add a blog to this index, feel free to post a comment below or email me at [email protected] with the word “geoblog” in the subject line.
I hope to make this a weekly series here on ReadWriteWeb, for geo tech blogs and other topics, including blogs about data.
If you’re a casual reader, I invite you to click around through this incredible list of resources. It’s an overwhelming amount of content, but here at ReadWriteWeb we’re tracking all these blogs as closely as we can and writing up what we think will be of most general interest. You can also follow a dedicated Twitter account for this topic at @RWWGeo.
Earth pic from Flickr user AussieGal, by Creative Commons license.
