I have become fascinated with The Map Room: A Weblog About Maps. Which is, in and of itself, interesting since I have only a traveler's interest in maps usually. Can't explain it, won't try.

I found today's post, Two Ways to Geocode Your Blog, particularly interesting. The idea that a blog can be placed on a map is something I will have to think about. You see for me, I have a physical location but my blog transcends physicality...it is everywhere and nowhere at once. Likewise a permanent metadata tag that gave my physical location would be a triviality in creating any ontology to classify my blog.  Besides which location would I give? Home, main campus, Indy campus, local campus, one of three local libraries, or some short-term location where to which I have traveled...all of these are locals where I have been while posting blog entires.

I should add that all of that is without even touching the safety issues that go with telling the entire planet where you are sitting at a given moment. "Big brother is watching" at its worst, and voluntarily signing on to it makes it even more uncomfortable.

Here's a taste of the post, it is full of links so check out the original:

"Geocoding" is adding latitude/longitude data to something to indicate its physical location — for example, geocoding a digital photograph so you can pinpoint where it was taken, or geocoding your blog so that people can know where you're blogging from. Now, as far as blogs are concerned, the most frequent use of geocoding is to be able to show which other bloggers are located nearby. A few blog maps showed where some bloggers were relative to one another, but the biggest geocoding project was probably GeoURL: it generated lists of nearby bloggers based on latitude/longitude data embedded in a web page's metadata. (It was one of Joshua Schachter's many projects; another one turned into del.icio.us).

Posted by prolurkr at March 20, 2005 06:23 PM

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