Over next couple of days, we will be moving Feedmap to new (and more robust) servers - and I'm expecting this migration to be as pain-free as possible without any data loss. So if you notice any down time, now you know why.

Thanks for your understanding and support.

Cheers!

If you use Flickr to share your photos online and if you want to geocode (tag the location of the photo taken), you should check out my new app: geotagr!

Try it out and let me know your feedback!

One of the core tenets of Virtual Earth is to provide a rich and immersive way to explore information using maps - so naturally, I wanted to extend exploring blogs on Virtual Earth using the APIs exposed on the FeedMap; and here it is:

FeedMap BlogExplorer!

Here are features:

1. You can right-click on the map and explore blogs
2. Click on "explore" to show blogs at the center of the map.

You can drag and zoom the map like you do in Virtual Earth either by using your mouse or keyboard.

The idea is to extend this "context" menu to add "Submit Blog" for feedmap sometime soon.

Finally, I have an excuse (kind of lame): I didn't get a chance to test this on FireFox browser - so sorry if it doesn't work - but I will look into it eventually.

Using the new ping feature, you can now update your blogmap location by submitting your blog at the update page. Check it out: http://www.feedmap.net/blogmap/ping.aspx

Cheers!

Ian Davis is compiling a full list of Web APIs, check it out!

Today, I have extended the search api (blogmap.search method) as following:

1. Now you can search for blogs using lat/lon pairs.

Example: http://www.feedmap.net/blogmap/services/rest.ashx?method=blogmap.search&lat=47&lon=-122

2. You can specify number of blogs to be returned as an argument.

Example: http://www.feedmap.net/blogmap/services/rest.ashx?method=blogmap.search&lat=47&lon=-122&count=10

Also, Daniel wrote to me about adding apis to get city, state, country given a blog feed. It's already there: just use the blogmap.getblogmap method and it returns the xml from which you can get city, state and country information.

Cheers!
 

Just came across this article by Jonathan Dube about finding local blogs; its cool that feedmap is mentioned in this article; but the url mentioned (http://www.csthota.com/blogmap) is a bit old. The new url is http://www.feedmap.net!

Both James and Daniel think that BlogMap is way too cool. Daiel even hints to build something cool with the APIs. That would be cool because I'm looking forward to getting feedback to improve the APIs. Of course, if I get any time to work on FeedMap, I first want to create user profiles so that you can edit location and configure blogmap settings and so on - will probably get to that after TechEd next week.

Today I also saw Chris Sherman's article about blogdigger's service that brings local bloggers. Not sure where this service gets the directory from - but looks interesting.

With work at work, work on my book and work with my new home, I have been slacking on BlogMap these days. I have been getting great feedback but I'm unable to respond in a reasonable and timely fashion, sorry about that guys.

When things get under control, hopefully soon, I will get back to the ever growing list of things to do for BlogMap that includes bug fixes (thanks to you all for reporting) and new community related features.

In the meantime, please keep sending me feedback and talk about any other issues in the BlogMap Groups.

Thanks for all your support; with 6000 + members so far, I feel this is just the beginning!

Cheers!

Many people have asked/blogged - BlogMap is cool; but why do I need it? Chris Short seems to have a good usecase.

ResearchBuzz talks about BlogMap. Sweet!

So, when I originally called the new feature that I introduced in BlogMap a Neighblog, not every one liked it; when Robert Scoble posted about Neighblogs yesterday, I saw rants from people about the naming.

Oddly enough, today when I searched for "NeighBlog" I see people using it on the web, freely; see examples here, here and here. There is even an entry in Technorati tagged under "NeighBlog"! While I agree that it's not the easiest word to use, it makes immediate sense to a person who's reading it or listening to it. :)

Now, when can we officially accept that NeighBlog is a defined tag in Blogosphere folksonomy (err taxonomy)?

PS: When I checked del.icio.us, none of the 59 BlogMap enthusiasts tagged it with neighblog though, but I'll keep watching.

So, I got a chance to work on BlogMap a little bit this weekend and here is a list of new features I added:

1. REST APIs
2. Discussion Group
3. Submit Blog using Latitude/Longitude

It's really exciting to see more than 3500 active bloggers on BlogMap; now beyond adding a BlogMap badge to your site, what else can you do using the APIs? Let's see who will come up with a cool app first! :)

PS: If you need more APIs, or if you find bugs with existing ones, pl. let me know by leaving it in the comments.

This is cool, check this out: http://del.icio.us/url/79e8c6c321826ff14f47da9cca6df273

One of the core motivations behind my BlogMap service is to connect people via location; and I feel happy when I see it is really working. This is not the first time that I read something like this about BlogMap service, but this time when I read this post, I almost kicked myself for not keeping track of all blog entries that talked about "finding fellow bloggers" using BlogMap. Oh, well, but from now on I will try to keep track of these blog posts, but if you find similar posts, please send them to me!

Cheers!

If you are using either a blogmap or blogmap badge in your blogs, you might have noticed the slow response time in getting the image (yes, I'm getting so many requests now, so we may have to move to a new server). I'm working wth my hosting company to look into this and will post an update soon.

Thanks for your patience!

Update: BlogMap seems to be stable now; if you see any issues, ping me!

I met with "Syndica8" Jeff last week; as he said in his blog today, we are going to work on a nice integration story for Syndic8 and BlogMap. In the mean time, you should check out Jeff's note about adding metadata to your feeds; it's super exciting to see more and more metadata building around blogs and feeds - way to go!

BlogMap has now around 250 Indian Bloggers - thanks to Thennavan for offering to integrate his collection with BlogMap.