The voting page for the Yahoo People’s Choice Award 2006 is up – Geograph has been nominated, you know what to do – go and vote here!

Edited to add Geograph is the winner in the Travel category – now it’s just down to votes to see who is the overall winner!

Had a whirlwind trip to Stockholm during the past 24 hours, visiting the Swedish National Heritage Board to talk about how they might setup a Geograph for Sweden.

Gary Rogers and Barry Hunter had arrived earlier in the week to give a talk at a Geographically themed conference, which was very well received and had the highest attendance for the two days of the conference, generating a lot of interest in getting a Swedish version off the ground.

Our very hospitable hosts picked our brains for most of the day about how Geograph was born, how it is run, and the challenges we’ve faced and new ones to come. At the start of the talk I pulled up the geocaching.com forum post by Gary which kick started the whole thing off. It was dated early February 2005, and of course by end of March we had launched a working implementation of the site. While that is indeed fast work, it brought home that “doing a Geograph” isn’t a technical problem, it’s a social one. How do you build a community of people that *want* to take part, that find it fun and worthwhile? Can a government organisation even do that? If not, how can they incubate something that does work for Sweden.

We’ve left them to ponder that one for a bit.

Hopefully, sometime next year, we’ll see a new Geograph being born to our scandinavian friends!

(Written in Arlanda Airport, killing time before my flight back to Blighty…)

In a recent post I mentioned I’d been trying in vain to see if the British Library were interesting in archiving Geograph.

I finally managed to reach the right people this week and they sound enthusiastic about the idea, but sadly their current technology is not equal to the task. The archive is just too big for them to handle, but they are working on their systems to make this possible next year.

We’ve got the equipment and the funds to keep the site running for at least 3 more years, with a good chance of being able to ensure it is funded for many more years. But, if those plans should come to naught, it’s nice to know that the archive will preserved for future generations!