Diana Ransom of the Wall Street Journal writes, "Cambridge Community Television, a public-access Web site serving Cambridge, Mass., offers a seminar course that has students create documentaries about neighborhoods in the city. The videos will be geotagged and inserted into a Google map of the city. When people click on a small icon overlaid on a certain street, they might see a short profile of a local nonprofit or a community figure. Eli Kao, the site's online community developer, expects the program's approach to 'portray a living, breathing community in a way not possible with traditional maps and demographic data.'"

Read the rest of the article here:

Location, Location, Location
'Geotagging' lets Web users put all that information in its place
By DIANA RANSOM
November 27, 2006; Page R9

The Internet is getting a lesson in geography.

The lesson comes courtesy of a new technology, called geotagging, that
lets you add geographic information, such as an address or latitude and
longitude, to any digital content -- everything from photographs and
videos to news articles and blog posts. Then the content can be easily
displayed on an online map or cross-referenced with other information
about that location.

"It's the equivalent of writing the year and the names of people on the
back of a photo," says Stewart Butterfield, co-founder of Flickr, a
photo-sharing site now owned by Yahoo Inc. For instance, some photo sites, such as Flickr, let users upload photos and drag them onto a world map, placing them on the spot where they were taken. That process automatically codes the photos -- invisibly -- with latitude and longitude information. Then, when other users home in on the map in that spot, they'll see all the photos tagged with those coordinates.

In some cases, the photo sites let you work backward, too: If you're
browsing through photo galleries, you can click on a link and see a
detailed map of the spot where the photo was taken. Mashes and Maps Other sites let users upload all sorts of geotagged content, such as news stories or blog posts. Users can then search for information about a particular place by clicking on a map or entering the place name in a search box. The Web site Outside.in, for instance, lets users upload blog posts, news stories and other information about 51 cities in the U.S. Users can tag the information -- as well as browse it -- by district name or ZIP Code.

"We're constantly deciding to do things based on their relative location
to us, and our interest in things varies dramatically depending on
location," says Steven Johnson, a technology writer in Brooklyn, N.Y.,
who founded Outside.in. "Once you have [lots of content geotagged], you
can define [the area you're interested in] and search for the content."
Geotagging is similar to another online practice called "mashups," where
users place information, such as real-estate listings, onto an online
map. Click a particular area on the map and, in this case, you'll see
all the houses for sale there. The difference is that mashups are
created using listings that already contain addresses or other
geographic information. With geotagging, users add the location details.

So far, the most popular application of geotagging has been online
photos. The notion of adding geotags to digital photos has been around
for years, but it got a big boost last year, when Dan Catt, a
London-based interactive-systems designer, created software that vastly
simplified the process. You could simply drag a photo from Flickr onto a
Google Inc. map, and Mr. Catt's software automatically tagged the picture with latitude and longitude coordinates, as well as the term "geotagged."

Mr. Catt created a Web site, GeoBloggers.com, where users could tag and
share their photos. Word of the application began to spread and soon
other photo-sharing sites followed suit, including Geosnapper.com,
SmugMug.com, Zoto.com and Plazes.com. These sites host hundreds of
thousands of photos and attract users from around the world.
(GeoBloggers now serves as Mr. Catt's personal blog.)

SPOT ON A photo linked to a map showing its subject's location in a
Pakistani city Awais Yaqub, a student and amateur photographer who lives in Pakistan, geotags his photos on SmugMug.com. In an email, Mr. Yaqub says geotagging enables him to track his travels and provide context for
others viewing his photos. "My photos are often shot...in streets that
are hard to find," he says.

For instance, search SmugMug for the Pakistani city "Faisalabad," and
you'll find Mr. Yaqub's photo of a clock tower in the heart of town.
Then, if you click on the site's "map this" feature, you can get a
Google map of the area, showing an aerial view of the clock tower in the
center of converging streets.

"I get numerous emails and comments [from] people [who] show a lot of
interest in this country as it has become difficult to travel here,"says Mr. Yaqub. "So my aim was to do something for these people through
photography and now geotagging makes it more interesting and more real."
By far the largest of the geotagging photo sites is Flickr. In August,
Flickr launched a feature similar to Mr. Catt's that lets users tag
photos by dragging them onto a Yahoo map. Flickr users added more than a million photos to the map within the first 24 hours, and the site now
boasts more than seven million publicly viewable geotagged photos.
The abundance of pictures gives users lots of detail about particular
locations. Say you want to scope out a neighborhood where you're
thinking of moving. You can go to the Flickr map site at Flickr.com/map,
find the desired location and view possibly thousands of geotagged
photos. You can also narrow the search with keywords. For instance,
searching the New York City map for "parks" turns up more than 12,000
geotagged photos of parks in the area. A search for "graffiti" gets more
than 1,400 photos.

Points of Interest
While geotagging mainly involves photos, a few other sites have cropped
up that combine maps and other content. The Freesound Project, run by
the Music Technology Group of Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona,
allows its Internet community of musicians and artists to geotag their
recordings. Visitors can browse a Google Earth map on the Freesound site
and click on various locations to hear, for instance, the sounds of an
Egyptian market or a bird in a Panamanian rain forest. "What better way to represent a field recording than by attaching it to the geographical location where the sound was recorded?" says Project creator Bram de Jong.

Cambridge Community Television, a public-access Web site serving
Cambridge, Mass., offers a seminar course that has students create
documentaries about neighborhoods in the city. The videos will be
geotagged and inserted into a Google map of the city. When people click
on a small icon overlaid on a certain street, they might see a short
profile of a local nonprofit or a community figure. Eli Kao, the site's
online community developer, expects the program's approach to "portray a
living, breathing community in a way not possible with traditional maps
and demographic data."

Of course, users aren't completely satisfied with the geotagging
experience. One big complaint is that Yahoo, Google and Microsoft
Corp. -- the main suppliers of mapping data -- offer lots of street-level detail
for the U.S. and Europe but much less for other parts of the world. The
companies say they're committed to expanding their mapping coverage. In
the meantime, the sites generally allow users to tap other mapping
services to cover areas that aren't filled in.

Such complaints aren't likely to slow the growth of geotagging --
especially since devices are hitting the market that make the process
even simpler. Nikon Corp. makes an attachment for some of its cameras that automatically adds global-positioning-system coordinates to a photo. Some geotaggers use a GPS device from Sony Corp. that
records the photographer's coordinates every 15 seconds. After you
download your digital photos to a computer, the Sony device can add GPS
coordinates to the pictures, by cross-referencing the GPS information
with the time stamp on the photos.

Next year, meanwhile, Nokia Corp. plans to release a camera phone that can automatically geotag photos. The cellphone maker plans to sell the phone for around $700. "Mapping and routing will belong to the standard phone experience in the next couple of years just as cameras are today," predicts Ralph Kunz, vice president of Nokia's multimedia group.