The Placeblogger site puts social content in a geographic and chronological context allowing easy aggregation of blogs about anyplace. By geo-locating blogs and other content, readers can easily explore any place ... somewhere you are now - or somewhere you were, or a place you might be soon.

Knight Foundation 2007 News Challenge grant winner Lisa Williams came to Raincity Studios to help build the vision she described as, "To make it easier for people to find hyper-local news and information about their city or neighborhood through promotion of “universal geotagging” in blogs."

Bloggers add their feed url, along with information about where in the world they are blogging from (or about). Using geo-location, blogs are grouped by area, and gathered with geo-tragged Flickr photos, Wikipedia information and Google maps, for easy subscription. So, readers interested in a specific locale can quickly see all blogs from a region on a personal Placeblogger aggregator page.

Locals can stay up on hyper-regional news and views, ex-pats might follow their hometowns, while travelers can discover advance information on destinations. While on the go, readers and bloggers can easily temporarily attach/detach to a city to coordinate with a travel itinerary. I.e. blogging from Seattle on Monday, reading blogs, in NYC on Wednesday, and reading and writing Prague blogs on Friday.

Participants can also add friends, follow buddies' content, add fave places, denote fave placeblogs posts, or and other feed items, for easy customization based on where you are.

Raincity Studios worked with Ms. Williams on the whole undertaking, from strategic planning through design, custom code development, data migration, themeing and deployment.

Along with the Drupal development came a ground-up re-design with emphasis on usability and user experience to ensure a streamlined engagement for the general public, not just experienced geeks.

The optimum user experience required organizing the places and placeblogs with as little redundancy as possible. Additionally, custom code development was required for reverse referencing of the hierarchies, and integration with Geonames (open source geo-coding software with API) which sends back geo-coordinates when the user types in their address.

The site is deployed on a Bryght Drupal-optimized VPS complete with a support agreement, and hosted at Bryght's Canadian data centre.

We're pleased to build this location-focused, feed reader which allowing readers, writers and producers to gain and share deep local knowledge about micro-locales, ... because wherever you go, there you are.