Geotagging your WordPress blog

Image by [Dicky] via Flickr

Well WordPress has beaten Twitter to it. You can now Geotag your blog and your posts – see a Blog Near You

I have for some time been geotagging my Flickr photos and of course I have been exploring my location aware mobile phone and all those lovely apps that make use of my location like Google Latitude.  Most of these location aware apps will publicise your location in Twitter either directly or through Fire Eagle.  Latitude gets a bit complicated but even that is possible see my post about My Lattitude Location in Twitter

Now if you enable geotagging in your WordPress profile you can share both the location of your blog and the location of you blog post.  At the moment WordPress have not made any tools available that will make use of your location, although some are promised.  However as the location is stored as geo microformat, geo.position and ICBM meta tags, and GeoRSS and W3C geodata in feeds it should be discoverable by tools that recognise such formats.  If you use the Firefox browser you could try the browser plugins like Operator and Geo.

Gradually, step by step the web is being semantified, so that machines (software) can recognise the format of the data and can therefore be specific about what it is.  Location is just one such format. There are formats for places, people events and others that can now be recognised by the search engines. See from Tags to Meaning

The next step will be even more useful when we can link from one site to the next because we (or our software) can recognise the same data in each site and know that it is the same object.  The BBC has been doing this already with their artist links to MusicBrainz and DBpedia in this blog from OpenLink.

I have geotagged this blog and this blog post if you want to try locating me.

If you are using Windows Live Writer for your blogging then as yet it doesn’t pick up the geotagging feature.

The Web of Data approaches.