Angela Gunn writes some kind words about Spotstory in today’s USA TODAY Tech_Space.  We wholly approve of her take-charge attitude:

Okay, people, I have a mission for our summer lolling-about-taking-photos time, which is fast approaching: I think we need to build out the wonderful Spotstory site past its New England roots.

[…]

[T]he site couldn’t help but be improved by a glimpse of wherever you are.

Like I said: we could not agree more!

Spotstory has been a growth experience for me.  Sometimes I’m aware of this while it’s happening, while sometimes I realize, suddenly,  that I look at certain things differently.  This is a story about the latter.

So, last month I’m checking out the website of a new company from one of the industries in which I used to work.  I was simultaneously dumbfounded, depressed, and annoyed by what I saw.

I’m not going to bore you with details.  My intent isn’t to call out these folks in particular.  Plus, you’ve already seen this website replicated countless times: stock photos of impossibly earnest or happy, diverse, and well groomed people staring intently into computer screens.

Of course there’s the obligatory press-release in press-release-ese and the marketing copy that’s relevant to, I dunno, somebody.  You know, its full of proactive language that sounds positive, but in the end you’ve got no idea what they’re actually selling.

I’m looking at this and my immediate reaction is: “These people would be much better off with a blog.”

I was surprised by this! I said “Huh, I would not have said that half a year ago.”

Then, blogs struck me as somehow possibly useful, but also sort of superficial: window dressing for your site, in the same league as rectangles with rounded corners.

Today, I can’t image how a company can not have a blog.

Though our blog has its ups and downs, I love it!  It gives us a way to communicate what Spotstory is about, explain its features at length, and keep users appraised of new releases or upcoming features.  It gives users a way to easily talk back to us.

It also allows us to give back to the communities we’re a part of by helping to promote events, and as a vehicle for contributing technical information and source code.

It makes it very easy to talk with people without having to rely on industry press or a sales force.  It’s lightweight and agile. 

Plus, All of this information on the blog attracts search engine traffic.  A lot of that traffic then follows through to our main site, that is, our product!

This is how we’ve used  blogging.  In a lot of ways, we’re a very small fish dealing with a very large audience.  Imagine what a company in a niche market serving a well defined customer base could do.

I’m not saying a blog-only website is right for everyone.  Everything I’m talking about could probably done with a traditional web site.  In fact, I’m sure we’ll have one of those too some day, though I hope we manage to avoid the bad stock photos.

So, my friends out there in the old world, think about blogging!  Sure, issue your press release, but also write an accompanying blog entry in plain (BS-free) language that your customers can understand.  Write technical white papers, but also have an ongoing open dialog about how your product can be used.  Have a bug tracking system, knowledge base, and a product roadmap, but have a frank and honest conversation with your users about the strengths, weaknesses, and direction of your product on a daily basis.

Your customers will thank you, you’ll learn a lot, and you’ll have a lot of fun.

Google Maps Mania mentioned us today.

Howdy, Spotstorians!  We did a major system update on April 24, 2007 around 11:45 ET.  We hope you enjoy.  This release contains:

• KML support See your Spots in Google Maps and Google Earth!
• Rails 1.2.3 We’ve updated to the latest and greatest Rails!
• Bug fixes Always some bug fixes for you!

KML

You can now view your Spots using either Google Earth or Google Maps.  There are a couple of ways to do this.

Google Maps

Currently, the only way to see a Spot is to provide a URL in the search box.  When Google has crawled the site (the next day or so), you’ll be able to find your Spot in the Google search results.

To see your Spot right now, go to a Spot, take its URL, copy it into the Google Maps search box, and append the suffix “kml” onto it like so:

  http://www.spotstory.com/spots/show/120.kml

To see what this looks like, just click here.

As I mentioned, Google hasn’t sucked our KML into their index yet, but when they do, you should start seeing your Spots appear in Google Maps under the “See user-created content” link at the bottom of the left-hand side of the page.

We’ll let you know when this happens.

Google Earth

To see your spots on Google Earth, you can go to the Spot, and click on the “KML” link under the map.  If you have Google Earth installed, it should load automatically.  (If you don’t have Google Earth installed you can can download it from here.)

You can also right-click to save the content to disk, and load it into Google Earth from there.

Rails 1.2.3

This isn’t a change you’ll notice, but we get a lot of traffic from the Ruby on Rails community, so we thought it made sense to mention that our production environment is now using Rails 1.2.3.  For details, you can see Aron’s great post about his Rails 1.2.3 upgrade travails.

Thank You!

That’s all for this update.  Please let us know if you find any problems.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to the site either with content, comments, or attention!

When we started working on Spotstory, Aron and I had many conversations like this:

Matthew: “Oh, we should have a feature like [some feature]!”

Aron: “Yeah, and you should be able to get it via an RSS feed!”

Matthew: “Uh, okay … oh, and we could do this thing where we [do some other thing]”

Aron: “Definitely!  Oh, and you should be able to get at it with an RSS feed!”

And so on.

Now, I’ve simplified this conversation a lot to make a point (that is, I’m not implying that Aron’s only contribution to the site’s design was to follow up each statement I made with “and we should make it available with a feed!”)

What I am trying to point out, is that from day zero we made a decision to have Spotstory be as open as possible, and a major aspect of that was to have data bubbling out of all these RSS feeds.

I didn’t quite appreciate this at the time (but I should have, since I’ve long been a “open an API to your software and people will do unexpected things that amaze you” kind of guy.)

Anyway, a couple days ago I was thinking, “It would be cool if we could have a list of recently created Spots in the sidebar of the blog.”

And then it occurred to me: there has to be a WordPress plugin out there somewhere that will do this.  And if there is, I know we have the feed.

If you haven’t already, cast your eyes over to the sidebar and see a happy little list of the most recently created Spots on Spotstory.  It took five minutes–literally–to put it together. (It took longer to write this blog entry!)

Special thanks to Chris Hatcher and his nifty SideRSS WordPress plugin and thanks to Aron, too,  for having the foresight to make sure we did the right thing from the start.

Update

I just realized that if you’re reading this in a feed reader, you won’t see the sidebar!  Oh, the irony.

During the early days  of Spotstory (you know, a couple months ago) we started throwing a lot of features at folks.  Usually, we gave these new capabilities a brief mention in the release notes, and then hoped people would find them and use them.

A few nights ago, we were talking to a longtime user (in relative terms!) of the site. I mentioned Locations, and this person didn’t seem to know what I was talking about.  So much for hope!

So, I figured that it was probably a good time to step back and cover some of Spotstory’s features in a little more detail.  Since Locations were the inspiration, I’ll start this series of posts with them.

What is a Location?

So what’s a Location?  It’s what it sounds like: a place somewhere on the planet!  It’s a latitude and a longitude.  They also have a name (e.g. “Parent’s House”, “Home”, “Ski Lodge”, etc.)  That’s it!

Why do I care?

You can think of a Location as a bookmark for the face of the planet.  It’s a way for you to watch a specific place for the appearance of new Spots.  You can even get an RSS feed for the Location which is updated when new Spots appear.

How do I Create one?

Locations are easy to create.  Just go to your home page and click on the edit icon next to ”My Locations,” you’ll find it on the upper right hand side of the page.   From there, just follow the instructions.

You can create as many Locations as you’d like.  Currently, the Locations you create are private. 

If you’ve got any other questions, comments, or suggestions about Locations, or anything else, we always love to hear from you!

I hope you’ve enjoyed this intro to Locations!  I’ve covered most of the details here but there are a few more neat things about them you’ll discover, I’m sure. So get started: go create a Location today for your home, your childhood home, your favorite vacation spot or any other place you fancy!

We often get asked why we didn’t seed Spotstory with content from some other source. Certainly, databases with location data are easily obtained and integrated.

I imagine that anyone launching a site that depends on user generated content, or some other sort of social media,  is going to ask themselves this question.  I’m not sure that there is one right answer for everyone’s circumstance, but I can explain how we made our choice.

Pros

Here are a couple of reasons we came up for why we might use seed data.

• Empty sites are no fun We’ve probably all had the experience where we see a site’s launch announcement on TechCrunch or Mashable!, only to find the the site contains only three or four data records (usually someplace in downtown San Francisco.) Seeding with a pre-existing database seems to solve this problem.

This is the big argument for seeding, and, no doubt, for certain services it makes complete sense.

• Scaling You want to make sure your system scales to handle the large datasets (you hope!) you will have some day.

This argument is probably less often voiced, but it should be!  It’s definitely the right thing for everyone to do:  you can use seed data during your development process, and then discard it before you deploy.  You can still keep it around in your development environment.  This is what we do.

Cons

Here are some of the reasons against using seed data.

• The site is still empty anyway We’ve all seen this too: you go to a site, click on a link, or search on a latitude/longitude, or place name and get 1000 results.  You click through them and find … nothing.

Aron and I discussed this at great length when we were getting started.  We’d experienced many sites that were filled with this “empty” data and the sites just felt … empty.  Big certainly, but empty nonetheless.

(I have a lot more to say here, but it’s a tangent to the topic at hand.  I’ll write more about it later, I promise.)

• It’s illegal It’s mechanically easy to access and import data, but do you have the right?

Now, there is a lot of data in Wikipedia that would be appropriate and welcome in Spotstory.  The problem is Wikipedia uses the the GNU Free Documentation License and Spotstory uses the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License for all text content.  Though these licenses share  the same spirit, they are not the same.

Some might see this as a technicality, but we don’t.  (And, yes, it is a challenge keeping unadulterated Wikipedia content out of Spotstory!)

In the end

In the end, we decided we’d start from scratch, and try to grow as much content as we could before we launched.  We felt it was important that actual people discover and share the Spots.  We thought it best that every Spot have associated with it a person who considered it interesting enough to share with the rest of the community.

Ultimately, this approach seemed most appropriate to the spirit of the site.

We’re based in the Boston area, and we’re happy at this moment to try and build a critical mass of interesting content for this area, and so far it seems to be working out well for us.

But, please, don’t let that keep you from creating Spots in other places! :)

We pushed an update of the system tonight around 11:15 PM ET.  This release primarily fixes issues reported during our launch.

• You can now choose the representative image for Spots and Visits Until now, the image shown on the Spot page, or as a thumbnail next to a Spot summary, would simply be the first image that had been uploaded to the Spot.  This was also true for Visits.  With this release, you can choose which image should be shown.  Just go to the Spot or Visit edit page, and the rest should be obvious.  This was the by far the most often requested enhancement!
• New feedback interface The old feedback interface did a bad thing: after you would go through all of the trouble to send us feedback, we would send you to a page that was not where you were, and with really with no place to go!  That was bad (and we’re sorry!).  The new feedback interface uses a popup which let’s you resume your train of thought once you’ve been kind enough to send us your insights.
• Streamlined goecoding interface for Spots  We’ve changed the way you tell us where a Spot is located.  We’ve taken the separate address lookup, and latitude/longitude entry boxes, and combined them into a single one.  We hope you find this arrangement easier to use.
• Spots can display an address Displaying just the latitude and longitude of Spots was initially neato, but it turns out the novelty wears off after while, and people just want to see the name of a town, a state, or a country.  So now you can associate the actual name of a place, and not just the GPS coordinates, with a Spot.  So, if it makes sense for your Spots to have an address, you can now update them with one.
• Many many other fixes and refinements  Many fixes and refinements, both large and small and too numerous to mention, have been made! 

Once again, we’d like to thank everyone who has sent feedback or dropped us an email for their time and effort.  Many thanks also to everyone that has contributed a Spot, and especially those who have contributed more than one!

Future Updates

We’re going to keep updating Spotstory on a continual basis, but in the future look for each release to have a theme.

This doesn’t mean we won’t be reacting quickly to major problems like we always have: each release will still contain numerous fixes for critical bugs, or problems that just seem particularly pesky.

We haven’t finalized the date of the next release, but it will probably occur in early May.

Thanks again for being a part of Spotstory!

As Matthew mentioned, I was at the Berkman Thursday Meeting on April 12th. I had a great time talking about Spotstory to everyone in attendance.

Thanks to Mike Walsh for the invitation and Erica George for help with some of the logistics.

Extra thanks to everyone who braved the weather on Thursday. From my office window, I watched as the weather cycled through sleet, rain, and maybe a little hail. The Red Sox may have been rained out, but the Berkman Blog Group persevered!

Aron will be showing Spotstory at this week’s Thursday Meeting at Berkman.  The meeting starts at 7:00 PM at The Berkman Center for Internet & Society, 23 Everett Street, Cambridge MA.  We’re really looking forward to this.

(Actually, I won’t be there.  I’ve already committed to attend the Social Media Club Boston event, “Ethics and the Social Media Generation Gap,” happening that same evening.  I am afraid can’t wait to see which side of the gap I’m on!)

Boston Ruby Group tonight

Finally, a reminder that both Aron and I will be presenting at tonight’s meeting of the Boston Ruby Group. It starts at 7:00 PM at One Broadway, Cambridge, MA.  Come on by if you’re an experienced Ruby hacker or just curious.