Around the World
A brief history of the City Daily Photoblog movement and a guide to sites around the world.
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This guide is both a record of old blogs and a listing of new blogs. Although originally arising from the CDPB lists this is an independent publication. Inclusion here does not imply that a blog qualifies for nor is officially a CDPB. Our criteria are that photographs mainly from a specific geographical location (not necessarily a "city" but usually more specific than a whole country or region) are posted at dated intervals (not necessarily daily) and archives are readily searchable by date. For locations with more than one blog, I've listed them in order of their creation. With only a few exceptions, I've also linked to the first posted photograph. In some cases this might not be the exact start date as sometimes older archives are no longer available, and sometimes a new blog starts with a few text only test posts. Please report any errors or ommisions, using the form provided at the "report changes" link found near the bottom of this page. There you will also find links to the CDPB portal and other pages connected with this web site. Changes to these lists are posted regularly on the supporting Around the World blog. The City Daily Photo collection of blogs really began with Eric Tenin in March 2005 when he launched his Paris – One Photo A Day blog. It attracted thousands of readers from the world over who had either been to Paris and wanted to re-live their experience; others who had never been but dreamt of visiting, and those who were planning a trip and surfed the site for interesting things to see. The blog name was changed to Paris Daily Photo and became so popular, that suddenly others started writing to Eric asking how they could start a similar blog for their own city. As conceived by Eric, the CDPB concept required that bloggers should
By early 2006 there were some thirty or so sites involved, ranging from large cities to quite small towns. A mailing list and a forum were organised to enable participating blog authors to communicate with each other and discuss relevant matters. The blogs all linked to each other. A links page was kept on a Wiki page so that each could copy/paste a standard set of links. Not all blog authors could (or wanted to) adhere to all the stipulations of Eric's concept; in particular that of posting every single day. For a time, there developed two lists; the DP list of blogs that more or less followed the rules explicitly and the CDP list of more spasmodically posting sites. DPs that didn't post for a week were moved to the CDP list and sites that stopped posting after a month were removed altogether. Some blogs moved regularly between the two lists. Keeping up with all the changes was, of course, time consuming and many blog authors were very slow to update their lists of links. As the number of sites grew past 50, 100, 200, it became increasingly more difficult to visit all the sites regularly. For a time, there was a web ring, but that is no longer in operation. What then developed was the City Daily Photoblog Portal. The portal allows visitors to view thumbnails of the latest pictures posted by registered sites. It has a forum for regular visitors and incorporates the old blog-authors-only forum. The database is updated regularly and new postings appear quickly. One outcome of the portal is that instead of static lists, needing regularly updating, sites can include a link to the portal and dynamic drop-down menus with up-to-date lists of active blogs. For many authors this allows them to provide a clean-looking link to the other sites and one that is updated automatically. The downside to the dynamic menus available from the portal is that they naturally exclude blogs that are temporarily unavailable (late posting, rss-feed problems &c) and they don't include a number of excellent sites (some even pre-dating Eric's Paris DP) that, for whatever reason, aren't members of the CDPB portal. It is no longer feasible for the majority of blogs to post a full static list of active sites. Many now just include lists of their favourites or some other subset. Here I try to include all present and past blogs that have vaguely followed Eric's concept, whether members of the CDPB family or not. |
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