GeoBlogging: Geo-tagging your blog posts

Over the weekend I picked up a little GPS device (a Garmin Geko 301). There has been a lot of talk about geo-tagging your photographs so that you can overlay them on maps (e.g. Google Earth) and so that you can find other photos taken at the same location as your (e.g. flickr). This GPS can be accurate down to 10 feet or so (it is WAAS enabled), and it’s very small and waterproof so seems like the perfect companion for this sort of thing.

Anyway, geotagging my photos is something I want to have a play with, and while I was thinking about this the idea of GeoBlogging popped into my head. It’s often said that you’ll never hav an original idea, and this is one of those occasions. Still, I thought it would be a great idea to geo-tag your blog posts so that people can find posts from people near them, or blogs from events or holiday destinations etc.

This is something we’ve been trying to do with BritBlog, and are in the process of dropping postcodes in favour of GeoURL-style metadata in a blog template:

< meta name=“ICBM” content=“51.2327,-0.3309″ />
< meta name=“DC.title” content=“Mark Sweeting’s Blog” />
< meta name=“geo.position” content=”51.2327;-0.3309″ />

If you could do this on a per-blog-post basis rather than just on a blog basis then you’re half way there. I was thinking microformats would be the correct approach for this, but you’d need better blogging software support for wide adoption. You’d also need to think about how you mark up RSS feeds.

As I mentioned above, it turns out this isn’t a new idea. If you’re interested in this sort of stuff then you probably want to do a google on the topic, and take a look at GeoRSS. I’m in a bit of a rush at the moment, but if anyone has any useful tips/links or thoughts on this, I’d be interested to hear them.

Tags: geoblogging, georss, geotagging, gps, blogging, microformats