Slashgeo

Three years already! Life is full of surprises when you look for them (sometimes even when you don't look!), as Slashgeo's main enthusiast, I have learned a huge deal in the process. I hope and believe Slashgeo.org is a useful website for the geospatial community. We're unique because our small team reads and selects the most pertinent geonews for our users out of tens of geoblogs entries everyday. We also offer original content. We're ad-free and as much transparent as possible.

The stats? Not sure they matter as much a user participation, but for the curious ones: over 10 million hits in three years, 1,700 registered members, thousands of unique IP addresses reached everyday, 3,200 geonews "stories" published so far (surprising even to me!), almost 3,000 user comments shared (I admit a lot by me as story followups).

I planned many important updates for Slashgeo's website, namely upgrading to Slashdot's AJAX code for faster comment sharing and no page reloads, however, Slashcode's CVS tags are not up to date and my developer is unavailable until next January, so I fear we'll have to wait another few months at minimum.

The most important element of this year for me? New Slashgeo.org volunteer editors joining me since about a year ago (see related stories below). Sincere thanks to this small team, with a special thank you to Lennox (username lxnyce) which published hundreds of stories in a year and was instrumental to keeping Slashgeo relevant by publishing geonews in my absence (parental leave since January). I'm now back behind my office desk, but user contributions (e.g. submitting stories and sharing comments) are more than welcomed, they are required for the success of the website. I sincerely hope you like the service we provide - the geospatial sector is a pretty exciting playfield!

Its been several months since our last Tip of the Day. A user sent me an email this weekend and it encouraged me to share this tip with you. By registering to Slashgeo (free & no ads) you can receive the daily headlines and/or the daily newsletter directly by email. What's the difference? Well, the headlines will send you the geonews titles only, which may not be sufficient to wholly understand what the news is about, while the newsletter is longer, it provides the full summary with all links. How to subscribe or change your prefs, go to your messages preference panel. Of course, you can prefer, along with thousands of our readers, to read Slashgeo through the RSS feed, which is in fact a georss feed but we don't systematically put in the location information. If you want to share or read user comments, you still have to actually visit the site!