More Geographic Blogging

In an earlier post (Geotagging, posted on 17 June 2005), I talked about an extension to RSS that would allow for encoding of geographic metadata into an RSS feed.
GeoNames RSS to to GeoRSS Converter takes this one logical step further. The GeoNames service takes an RSS feed, searches each entry for recognizable geographical locations, and returns a feed with the appropriate geographical metadata added on. And if you then view the feed through a GeoRSS newsreader (as the GeoNames web site points out, there aren’t many of these; they suggest the ACME GeoRSS Reader), you get a map with the locations of the item being discussed in the RSS entries.
This is perfect for news feeds — get a map of the world with the locations of the each news item shown on screen. As an example, take a look at today’s Reuters news. You can see where in the world the news is happening.
On a smaller scale, it might have great application in a library for local news, genealogical research, community events, and so forth. Let people pull up a map of events and pick the ones closest to their houses. Very neat stuff!