Planet Geospatial

Did James Fee really reboot? I'm not seeing a difference.

It's weird what an influence his site has on the informal discourse of the GIS business. It's hugely popular with the GIS community. I've heard from James that the traffic is big. It's my greatest referrer by far, about 3x what I get from Google searches. I'm not sure how a new blogger would get found in the past few years without emailing James. I've depended on Planet Geospatial to find new bloggers (Dan Shoutis and Regina Obe, to name a couple -- thanks, James!), but finding this signal in all the noise is increasingly frustrating. Only a very small volume of Planet Geospatial interests me, so little that my Greasemonkey script has become useless -- it often wipes the page clean.

(Note: I've probably benefited from Planet Geospatial as much as anyone: it was Planet Me-o-spatial for a while after the last reboot because he, Andrew Turner, and Howard Butler, IIRC, weren't posting nearly as much as I was at the time. A lot of those readers have stuck around (subscribed, even), if only for the spectacle of it -- watching me rip on OSGeo, tear into the OGC's service architecture, bite off chicken heads, or whatever.)

James has said he doesn't want to be a "gatekeeper", and maybe we can spread the load around a bit more. New referring planets have appeared in my logs: Planet OSGeo (funny, because I'm possibly the only unaffiliated open source person in the world), Planet PerryGeo, the Spatial Galaxy planet. I'd like to see new bloggers email the admins of those sites as well and give folks like me new and different places to discover new blogs.