Before we get to the day’s news (in the next post), do excuse this following bout of metablogging.

What is this blog good for? It’s a question I like to ask myself constantly (on a “know thyself” basis). Over the past 28 months, the answer has shifted, as it should. When Ogle Earth started in July 2005, Google Earth was a week old. Neogeography wasn’t yet a neologism. The premise of this blog was that the advent of geobrowsers would radically change how we navigate information. Charting that course was a personal interest, but as the popularity of this blog indicates, it has proved to be a widely shared interest.

But it is still a personal interest, and such interests do shift. With geobrowsing going steadily mainstream over the past 2+ years, I’ve become less interested in writing about geobrowsers than about their wider effect. The minutiae of successive feature updates are not in themselves all that interesting for me to blog, especially now that you can get that information from the horse’s mouth (as it should be).

By analogy, while it would have been very interesting to read a blog about web browsers back in 1994, I certainly wouldn’t do so now. While it was interesting for me to organize a conference for Swedish bloggers back in 2004, it wouldn’t make any sense now, when blogging is ubiquitous in Sweden. It would be like organizing a forum for television viewers:-)

So what is Ogle Earth good for now? This blog has had to compete for my attention with an ever-growing list of projects — ironically, many of them the result of this blog. I am going to spend less time on news and more time on analysis pieces. Sure, news still matters, and I read a whole lot of it, but if I don’t have any value to add, expect to see it mentioned briefly and in a not particularly timely manner in a grouped links item — even if it is big news. That’s pretty much like how this blog’s been written over the past few months anyway — but now it’s official:-)