Flutterby™! : Geographical Info 2002-01-24 17:25:46+00

Geographical Info

2002-01-24 17:25:46+00 by Dan Lyke 7 comments

Bill Kearney has said that he's going to be able to use geographical information in Syndic8. So in the section of the Flutterby page, there is now:

<meta name="geo.country" content="USA">
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Fairfax, California">
<meta name="geo.position" content="37.988428;-122.582952;120">

I realize that not everyone wants to give out targetting coordinates, but it might be cool to add this as a start towards a standard for search engines. I know I'm going to try to add it in my pages which describe a specific place. Anyway, if you don't have a GPS, Bill suggests checking Map Blast (which is what I used, registration required) or the Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names.

I'm just wondering where those coordinates ought to actually be for my site, my house or where the server is located? I know those coordinates you gave are no where near where your actual server is located so I guess that means you are using the coordinates for your house. Dan, that could be dangerous.

Yeah, but I figured the "public nuisance" factor of being responsible for the bodies if the actual location of the server got out was bad enough that home location was the better option. It's not like Meuon needs any more target practice...

I was over there the other day and no matter where I looked. . . He's got to keep himself protected from the poison dart people you know. ;-)

I'm not sure this is a good idea. With this geo.tag you are indicating that the whole page is about Fairfax, CA, yet there are entries relevant to Pennsylvania, Chicago, and other locations. I can see geo tagging your http://www.flutterby.com/danlyke/ page, since it relates to you and your location (for the most part). Or, if your weblog dealt with all things Fairfax, then it would be appropriate to geo.tag it as such.

I guess it all depends on what Syndic8 plans to do with the spidered tags. If they plan to simply show where, geographically, weblogs are being updated/served then that might make sense. But what about other sites (geotags.com) which expect the whole page to be about the area tagged? Or some not-yet-invented geographic search engine trying to leverage off of these tags?

Don't get me wrong, I love the idea of geo.tags and would love to see something for tagging individual weblog entries when they are geographically significant. This would allow us to find your Pennsylvania/Harry Potter posting when searching for news around Pennsylvania rather than when searching for news around Fairfax.

As much as I'd like to believe that geography isn't important in the age of the 'net, it is. In fact, it might be even more important now than it was 6 or 7 years ago, when the net itself was some sort of filter. The reason I live in the Bay Area is that networking happens face-to-face, and while we can keep in touch online, it's not really 'til we make those in-person meetings that we get a sense of knowing a person.

On other pages, where I describe places, I'll be putting the locations of those in the meta tags, but until we start tagging regions of text, a document level tag for my front page should probably give my address.

I am thinking about using class attributes to tag regions of my document, but I'm concerned about code bloat, and so am also thinking about a CSS like structure which would let me use named tags, and put the real stuff in a web service API somewhere.

Obviously there needs to be a plethora of new tags -- one for where the site is about (extendable in case it's about multiple places), one for where the server is, one for the owner's home (extendable in case there are multiple owners), the owners' summer homes, the kids' schools, the dogs' favorite place to pee...