What this is
GeoGazette turns writing into a narrated, animated map — a story that flies between real places, draws on them, speaks over them, and comes out as a link anyone can open or a video you can publish.
A story is a plain-text file. The same file plays in this website, in a QGIS plugin, and renders to video — because the story is data, not a recording of one application’s output.
The rule everything follows
The format specification has one invariant that the rest of it exists to protect:
A valid story must be playable from its declarative story data alone. External asset paths are optional and must never be required for core narration or rendering.
GeoStory profile 1.0, §2
In practice: the narration is text, not an audio file. The camera is coordinates, not a recorded move. A missing image is a missing image, never a broken story. Hand someone a .ov with no folder of assets beside it and they can still play the whole thing.
That is also the difference between this and a generated video of a place. An image model can draw something that looks like the Straits of Florida. It cannot tell you where they are. Every coordinate here is real, which is what makes a story checkable — and what makes it safe to put in front of a classroom or publish under a byline.
How the pieces fit
OpenVerb
The open execution framework. A .ov file is a list of actions a host can run — parsed by @openverb/format, executed by @openverb/runtime.
The geostory profile
What makes a .ov geographic: places, basemaps, layers, audio, media, annotations and scenes. Published as @openverb/geostory, it compiles a story into 24 geostory.* verbs.
This website
One host that implements those verbs. It plays stories, illustrates them, speaks them, and renders them to video in your browser.
The QGIS plugin
Another host implementing the same verbs. Same file, different renderer — which is the whole point of the file being a file.
You do not need any of that to use the website. It matters when you want to take your story somewhere else, which you can, at any point, by downloading the file.
See it before you read it
Everything above is one click away. The player is public — no account needed.