Placewatch

A good place to collect, organize, share, and preserve knowledge on things you care about.

One community — multiple thematic projects.

Take a look at some of them:

1201:future

Riga is not ready (but at least it tries). City development updates and ideas.

1201:past

History of Riga. The project where it all started.

Valmiera

Exploring history of Valmiera, Latvia. Managed by the town's local history museum.

Projects are made of notes.

From one-liners to full-fledged articles, here are the latest ones:

It’s especially useful if your knowledge fits on a map.

But that’s not required.

  • Put your data on the map
  • See all notes within polygon-located tags
  • Mark locations with issues
  • Import relations from OpenStreetMap
  • Export data as GeoJSON

… and expect more geography to come.

Preserve your knowledge.

Your efforts deserve to be safeguarded.

Every day, well-structured ZIP files with all text data and uploads are generated for each project. Project owners can make them public or keep to themselves.

Configure your project.

Make it meet your needs.

Choose who can post, switch anytime

Be the only narrator, select your co-authors — or let the world join the discussion!

Choose your licence

Protect your findings or let the world copy them like Wikipedia articles — the choice is yours!

Optionally, add your own domain

Build your brand. Hopefully you choose to stay — but if you don’t, your audience will follow you.

Start your project

Built with enthusiasm and experience.

Placewatch wasn't built in a day.

2001
A school project on 800th anniversary of Riga evolves into a popular blog on history and sights of the city.
2004
An old-school forum is added to the blog. People start talking.
2013
Zurbu, a moonshot at creating blogs and forums for local history enthusiasts worldwide, is launched. Old blog articles get migrated there.
2024
Finally, Placewatch appears. Rewritten from scratch, with all Zurbu data and new content, and an ambitious goal of providing like-minded people a convenient and safe space for the things they care about.

Who’s behind it?