Geotagthings

Geotagthings is a simple way to assign any web resource - anything with a url - a location in the normal, human physical world. The tagging process works much like del.icio.us style bookmarking - surf the web, click on the geotagthings bookmarklet, then double-click a point on a map to easily assign a lat,long to the url.

Once you've tagged some things, you can get feeds for your stuff, in georss or kml... or you can get custom feeds based on certain locations. Use the feed generator to define a place and a radius, and anything tagged by the geotagthings community that comes within that range will show up in your feed.

Geotagthings is pluggable. It's not a destination, nor a community site. It's meant to be used by destinations and community sites, or simply while going about your business, surfing the web.

Why in the World?

Why would anyone want to assign a geographic location to a web page? The simple reason is that people are already doing various projects that fell within the scope of making web data _also_ geographic data and we felt that there was a need for a low-impact, easy to use tool to help in our own little way. The more involved reason is that the Internet and other networks are very rap- idly spilling out into the physical world. Whether you call it pervasive networks, ubiquitous computing or the geospatial web, one can easily anticipate that the networks need geographic semantics. In the physical world, location means more than a uniform resource locators (URLs). In the physical world, the data that is sluicing around also needs to know where it is according to an additional set of geographic information, such as latitude/longitude, or relative location to canonical landmarks, or simply the town or city in which that previously non- geotagged data has relevance.