Around the World

This guide was both a record of old blogs and a listing of new blogs. Although originally arising from the City Daily Photo Blog lists this was an independent publication.

The time has finally arrived when updating these lists has become less of a pleasure and more of a chore.

Leaving the lists online as they were was not an option. Outdated information, dead links and worst of all corrupted links are the bane of the internet.

I won't kill these pages off immediately but won't be adding any new sites and I'm starting by deleting most dead and very spasmodic blogs.

In due course, however, I shall be deleting the lists entirely.

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

• post one photo a day, though not necessarily one taken that day.
• include a short caption describing the place, the situation, and sometimes a little history.
• the captions should be in English as a minimum, and sometimes in the native language.
• the blogger should ideally be living in the city they photograph and write about, so that they can share their perspective, although they do not have to be a native of that country.
• the name of the city should be included in the title of the blog.

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 links.

As the number of sites grew past 50, 100, 200, 500 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 includes a forum for regular visitors which 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, participating sites now 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 cleaner 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 tried to include all blogs that vaguely followed Eric's original concept, whether members of the CDPB family or not.