Internet Culture from London… and beyond
Geotag your Internet life
Tagging is an amazing way of categorising user-generated content and brings order to the huge amount of content on the Web. Don’t you love searching Flickr photos for inspiration, or browsing WordPress tags for articles of interest? None of this would be possible without tagging.
Geo-tagging has been around for a while, and millions of people are already doing so every time they upload a geo-coded photo to Flickr, or Tweet about a specific place. To get a sense of what some of this activity looks like, check out Twittervision (a bit spooky!) or Flickrvision (awesome!) which show Tweets and Flickr photos, on a map as they are posted to the Web.
There are quite literately dozens of new services that allow you to geotag your content – Moblog (mobile blogging), Twitxr (microblogging), or Dipity (lifestream) all allow users to geotag their content.
FriendFeed also just recently started adding Google Maps for any messages that contain location information, and Yahoo’s Fire Eagle makes it easy for other services to add their own geo-location layer. New kid on the block Shozu, also allows you to geo-tag your photos and upload them directly onto Flickr.
Although I love the concept behind geotagging, it is not mainstream yet. Geotagging in its current format is too complicated:
- Moblogging is great fun but unless you have an iPhone, it can get a little tricky…
- Have you ever tried dragging and dropping photos on your Flickr map? It’s pretty frustrating and I always end up dropping my photos in Essex rather London!
- Services such as Dipity automatically geotag all your content – I used a photo from another Flickr member which was automatically geotagged on my Dipity timeline; it’s not technically my photo and I didn’t want it to appear on my timeline… Geotagging would be a much better place if you could manually choose what content is geotagged.
- Geotagging with Shozu is still a little fiddly – make it easy! Not everyone is a geek!
What do you think of geotagging? What are you favourite geotagging applications?
| Print article | This entry was posted by Lolly on 10/11/2008 at 3:15 pm, and is filed under Social Networking - Tools & News, Web & Technology. Follow any responses to this post through RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site. |
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Blogtillyoudrop says: Find Me
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I can understand the extra value for Flickr.. geo-tagging.. but not getting yet the extra value for “normal” tweets..
about 1 year ago
I believe geo-tagging will play a big role in defining next generation mobile social media sites and tools.
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about 1 year ago
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Full disclosure: I work at Abaq.us
about 1 year ago
Phil – have you tried BrightKite? I am finding it a little difficult to use at the mo but I can definitely see value n the service
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about 1 year ago
Hi Lolly – very interesting article and thanks for mentioning ShoZu (I work for them). You mentioned that geotagging with ShoZu is “fiddly” – it would be great to have some input from you as to how we can try and make it easier.
about 1 year ago
Hi Steve,
Thanks for popping by. I think it would be really nice if you had some kind of fact sheet / step by step guide on how to geotag photos onto the ShoZu website for all GPS enabled phones – I’ll write another post very soon on the subject and you can leave me your thoughts then!