Hiking Melbourne

A couple of days after my last geocaching post Groundspeak announced an " introduce a friend " scheme. What a coincident. Basically a virtual badge will be added to your profile, if you're going caching with a muggle friend. I think nobody is under delusion that this will change the general trend but it seems to be more of a test. Groundspeak must be aware of the current downwards trend which begs the question: How did we get here? First let's have a look at other outdoor activities before we jump to any conclusions. Maybe outdoorsy things are going down in general and this is just how things are these days? Nope. That's not it. Everyone else is doing fine and hiking seems to be great. We do like that :) If you translate the search terms into German, the picture remains similar. Looking at the simple word "outdoor" the whole thing gets summed up quite nicely: Do you see Christmas time in there every year? Keep in mind this is only a ...

an opinion by Philipp about the development of Geocaching First of all: I'm not saying the good old times were better. I can think of annoying things which disappeared over the years but aren't covered here like crappy user interfaces. Fifteen years ago geocaching was substantially different to the game we play today but that doesn't mean today's game isn't fun anymore. But let's start at the beginning. It is fair to say that I am one of the old-school cachers. Having started in 2003 I have seen a lot of changes like the introduction of LED torches, the launch of Google Maps in 2005 or the release of the iPhone and the substantial introduction of the geocaching app in 2007. 12 years ago finding a cache was completely different process. First you had to figure out how to get there. Where the hell is that box? Seriously: There wasn't a map function on  geocaching.com ! You had to take the coordinates to mapquest and figure out how to drive there yours...