Unfortunately, Slashgeo is closing down, for an all too common reason: too much work to do in Alex’s spare time. Too few people who shared his enthusiasm for the project. And, though he doesn’t say it explicitly, for too little money: he floated the idea of ads last month so that he could hire some people to take on the workload, and the coup de grâce, as he puts it, is having his AdSense account terminated — before, seemingly, he could even get it off the ground. To be sure, Alex has been brooding on Slashgeo’s future and direction for some time. In the end, it was too much, and I can’t say I blame him. I’d be hard pressed to maintain The Map Room if it had to compete with a day job for my attention — especially if I couldn’t make any money from it.

(It does surprise me that he couldn’t make a go of it financially, given the traffic data he cites, which is something like four or five times my daily traffic — excluding RSS in my case, including it in his.)