"Our" Opencaching vs Garmin's Opencaching, a comparison of sorts

                    

Part two of two, You can find part one here. Since we at the world-wide Opencaching Network, which includes Opencaching North America, are often confused with Garmin's Opencaching.com, I figured a blog post comparing the two listing services was in order early on in the history of this blog. This blog post is highly influenced by a post fellow OpencachingNA Admin Dudley Grunt made to his local Geocaching forum in July 2012, and he posted links to that post at the forums of all the U.S. based alternative Geocaching websites. I asked him if he wanted to come on and do a guest post, but he was OK with my using it as reference material, and I promised to not to plagiarize it too much!!

 Ownership:
 Garmin: Like Groundspeak, the Garmin site is run by a corporation with relatively significant money to  invest in the site.
 OCNA:  The site is funded and run on a fully volunteer basis, essentially, as a not-for-profit entity. We pay for our three domain names and web hosting (at the well-known website host Rackspace.com) out of our pockets.

"Our" Opencaching vs Garmin's Opencaching, a history of sorts

A few notes first, I hope to post to this blog at least once a week, but I'm currently spending a lot of my free time educating myself with the OpencachingNA Linux server. Boy, is that a learning experience. It's only been eight days since the first post. Note that the "Latest Geocaches" and "Latest Log Entries" to the right of this post are from an RSS feed, and should be updated every time you view this page. As well as our Twitter feed too, of course.

OK, why are there two totally different alternative Geocaching entities calling themselves Opencaching? This short answer is, I don't know, ask Garmin! We, Opencaching North America, are part of the world-wide Opencaching network, established in 2005 with Opencaching.de There are currently nine Opencaching nodes, as we call them, that are part of this network. Opencaching.jp (Japan) has gone dark, and Opencaching.es (Spain) really just points to the German website, Opencaching.de. You can view them all at Opencaching.eu All characterized by their distinctive white and blue color scheme. Garmin came along, and purchased the domain name Opencaching.com in September 2010, and launched their website in early December, 2010.

A Blog begins...

Welcome to the first blog post of the Opencaching North America blog! You can read the introduction about who we are to the right of this post. We are a free, volunteer run and volunteer funded Geocaching listing site. So as you can see, this blog is a standard free Google Blogspot blog. We will eventually host it on our own server, although we have to do some domain name ownership shuffling amongst the Admins first. Then we may move to Wordpress, or other such dedicated blogging software.

I am Mr.Yuck, the primary author of the blog. But you can call me Jim (last name undisclosed). I am from the Buffalo, N.Y. area, and have been Geocaching since August, 2003. There are very few pictures on the Internet documenting my existence, but I managed to dig this one up in someone else's Geocaching log (taken July, 2012); this is me enjoying a 24 ounce can of Labatts Blue after a 1.2 mile hike to a .50 Cal ammo box. That's the lower Niagara River rapids (i.e. below the Falls) in the background.