I can’t remember the exact time that I met Paul Ramsey in person and had a conversation with him – it was either at the 2011 FOSS4G in Denver or the inaugural FOSS4GNA in DC the following year – but I clearly remember what he said to me. By then, I had been writing this blog for five or six years. I had also been on Twitter for three or four. Even I had noticed that the pace of my blog writing had slowed as I was micro-dosing the need to write on Twitter.
Paul said very complimentary things about my blog. I had written extensively about my experience with zigGIS – an open-source library that integrated PostGIS with ArcMap in the days before ArcGIS had native support for PostGIS. I had also written a series of posts about how to use Esri’s then-new support for PostGIS. Additionally, I had been tweeting a good bit about various topics by then, including GIS and open-source.
Paul looked at me and said “Keep doing long-form.” In our first meeting, he took time to explicitly cast a vote for continued blogging rather than social media posts. I have returned to that moment over and over in my mind since then. It’s probably one of the biggest reasons I have kept this thing going even when it would have been easier to simply not.
Paul was right. He was right where it concerned me and he was right where it concerned writing in general. In the last few years, the favorite social media crutch of Twitter has imploded and the geo-community has scattered to the four winds (Twitter, BlueSky, Mastodon, Threads). What’s left is long-form writing, which is why James and I started a successor to Planet Geospatial in an effort to make such writing more discoverable for the community.
Between blogs, Medium, Substack, and various newsletters, there is actually a lot of long-form writing out there related to geography, geospatial technology, and adjacent subjects. The demise of the blog, it turns out, has been greatly exaggerated. In my mind, long-form writing remain superior – not just to social media but also to podcasts and YouTube videos. The latter are linear formats that force me to sit there and direct my full attention whereas a well-written post is a resource I can keep open in a tab and return to as I work. In fact, the first thing I try to do with a podcast or video is convert it to a long-form text transcription so that I can jump to the parts that interest me.
When announcing GeoFeeds, James used the term “spatial writing” to indicate that blogs are only a part of the picture. I like this term and will adopt it. I will be focusing more on long-form writing here and, where appropriate, on my Substack. As we enter a period where more trusted sources of information are going dark, I feel like writing more and helping to surface the good work of others are two things I can do to help make things a little bit better. If you are writing about geospatial, data science, AI, or issues related to any of those topics and your platform has a feed, please submit an issue so we can add your feed to the aggregation.
Whether you’ve recently discovered this blog or have been following along since 2006, thank you for reading. And thanks to Paul for the long-ago nudge.
