These days we mostly interact with maps in a singular, digital manner. However, if you want to have a guaranteed way to get a conversation going in a group put a map in front of everyone and shortly the stories will start coming. “I remember when we were here and this thing happened.” A long time ago I was in Canada at a remote location fishing. Every evening over dinner the entire group would hover over the map of the area and share stories of the day. “This is where we caught this huge Northern.” “Over here is where the Walleye are in the morning.” “We took the boat down this stream and it was too shallow for the prop.” Maps can be an incredible way to tell stories.

Telling stories with maps is one of the things that I wish blogs did better. My blog has posts that I created from all over the place, but you wouldn’t know it to read it. You can see my archive of thousands of posts, but you cannot easily see the posts I created in Iceland, or various times I visited a specific state. How about the blog posts on a road trip that connect together to tell the story of the whole trip?

This desire to tell stories through maps is why I got really excited to see Micro Social add support for locations. Micro.blog has supported location data for posts since the very beginning. However, it has always felt like an afterthought created to allow people to import Foursquare activity. I’ve wished for years that the Micro.blog app would attach my location to all my posts. I get not everyone would want this, but it would seem to be an easy add for those that do. Now at least I can use Micro Social to do this.

Ultimately I wish that my blogging platform would allow me to use location like I use time stamps. The time stamp of a post is the when. The location is the where. The archive page shows posts by the when. There should be a map page that shows posts by the where. The same way I can create collections of photos, I would like collections of posts and then show a map of those collections. I can edit the time stamp of a post, I would like to edit the location of a post.

Even social platforms that do collect this information do this poorly. I suspect they mostly use location as another surveillance tool to target advertising as opposed to creating a new way to share things.

Full support of location data for posts would create a whole new way to tell stories and connect the writing on your blog together. I’ll keep wishing, but I know that if I could add and edit location data to posts I’d be doing that during gardening, and it would create an incredibly rich and vibrant way to tell more stories.