Everybody’s Asking, “What’s The Weather Like There?”

If there is one topic that most people are comfortable talking about it’s weather. In fact, it’s a topic that generates more interest than almost anything else.  Tonight I got a chance to meet a man who has made weather his occupation. Chuck Prewitt is one of the owners of Weather Underground, a site that gets more than 21 million visitors a month and provides weather data to Google and the AP, among thousands of others.

I asked him about the business and he shared some of the details with me. Prewitt said that when a blogger began posting articles about hurricanes on their site, he racked up an incredible 900,000 pageviews from a post about a particular storm. That shows how interested people are in the weather, and how universal this fascination is.

Prewitt’s job is to develop relationships with other websites to spread their widgets far and wide. In exchange for providing updated weather information about anyplace on the planet, they get links that take people back to their site. Truly win-win, my kind of deal. We envision putting a weather widget on every article on GoNOMAD so when you read a story set in Greenland, or in Botswana, you can see what the temperature is in real time right there at that destination.

Prewitt showed me an iPhone app the company developed that’s been a big hit among teenagers ages 16-28. It’s called Weather Quickie, and provides you with one line of data. “It will be warmer in South Deerfield tomorrow than it was today.” It also has a link to their wildly successful paid iphone app that for $6.99 gives you a live stream to more than 50,000 radio stations you can listen to on your phone.