I am working on a widget that shows a story of a hike on a google map.
What I am wondering is - other than asking people one by one, how do I get outdoor bloggers to use my widget on their sites?
Any suggestions would be appreciated :)
You could also turn it into a google gadget. If you have used igoogle, it has various gadgets for all kinds of purposes and they are embeddable on any web-page. I would encourage you to create this google gadget and blog more about it.
Also, you can go to meetup.com and look for hikers' meetups and share your widget link there. People who are really interested in meeting up hiking may also be interested in getting your widget.
How about just contacting these outdoors bloggers and ask them about it? asking them directly is the easiest way in my opinion.
Also, give it some time and keep blogging about it, monitor twitter for hiking related stuff and mention your widget, if you have enough tweets and blog posts about it, Google will eventually pick it up and your information about your widget will start appearing in google searches.