The garden blogger Down Under, Stuart at Gardening Tips ‘n’ Ideas, has piloted a world-map garden-blog directory that I think is fantastic. Designed to help people find garden bloggers in their “neighborhood,” the map allows you to click on a country to see where bloggers are located.
For instance, if you click on the United States, you see red dots scattered around the country that represent garden bloggers who’ve linked into Stuart’s site. Click on the dot that represents Austin, and you get summaries, screen shots, and links to Digging and Zanthan Gardens (as of this writing; I hope to see all the Austin garden-bloggers there soon).
I just moved my cursor over a red dot on South Carolina, and a label identifying the town as Greenville popped up. How about that, I thought. I grew up just an hour away from Greenville, in even-smaller Greenwood, and I had no idea that I could be reading a garden blog from my childhood “neighborhood.” Clicking on the link, I notice that Growing Southern doesn’t advertise that it’s located in Greenville; it only mentions South Carolina. But now that I know the specific town, I’m more interested.
And just think—you can do this all over the world. Or at least you will be able to, once a lot of garden bloggers send their links to Stuart. So come on, all you garden bloggers. Get on the map!
In addition to the map, users will also find a search feature that searches only among the garden bloggers whose sites are linked. So you can look up, say, nolina, and know that your search will yield information from gardeners who’ve grown it themselves. Very cool.
I’ve linked to the map in my sidebar under Blog Lists. Check it out. And thanks, Stuart, for a great new tool to find other garden bloggers. Good on ya, mate!