Introducing Placeling: Cities are Stories

The following is a guest post by Lindsay Watt, co-founder of Placeling.

If you’re a Canadian WordPress blogger, chances are that at least once you’ve written about a location. In this vast land of rugged beauty and cosmopolitan cities, there are lots of places to write about.

And you wouldn’t be alone. Canadian foodies blog about the restaurants they frequent. Canadian moms share tips on places that are mom- and family-friendly. Travellers are writing about where they’ve been so that friends can experience it too.

But blogging about locations has always felt deeply unsatisfying.

The first reason is that blogs are organized by time, not geography. There’s no easy way to explore a blog by place, not time – and a blog post about Banff from two years ago is still highly relevant to a reader planning a trip there.

Secondly, exploring by place is complicated because ideally you want to know about nearby places a blogger has written about. You want to be able to open up your iPhone and see a map of nearby places your favourite blogger loves – and a link back to the post about each.

At Placeling – a Vancouver-based startup – we’ve been working on this.

With our newly-released WordPress plugin, you can tag your blog post with a location. Your readers can then use their iPhone to see nearby places you’ve written about – and there’s a link back to your post to read what you’ve got to say.

Click image to enlarge

And if your readers don’t have an iPhone, no problem. You also get a beautiful web-based map they can explore:

Tagging a location to your post is super simple – it’s just like uploading a photo. We add a little place marker next to the photo upload button to get you started:

To cue your readers that they can get these posts on their phone, each location-tagged post gets a footer. Your readers can click it to see that location – and all of your other locations – on Placeling:

Getting started is easy. Here’s what you need to do:

• Sign up for a Placeling account.
• Download and install the Placeling WordPress plugin.
• If you want to see the places on your iPhone, download the app.

It’s increasingly a mobile, local world. As a blogger, you’re a local expert and your readers should be able to get your recommendations as they’re out and about. Placeling’s here to help make that happen.