Weblog on the Internet and public policy, journalism, virtual community, and more from David Brake, a Canadian academic, consultant and journalist
15 January 2003

Here‘s something I wish I had thought of – a way to indicate where your web page is (or relates to). This page is served out of Toronto, Canada as it happens but it relates to me and my interests so I have just added a tag which indicates that this site “resides” at 51.00.06 N, 0.0515 E and if you look under my picture you can now find sites that are near my own. (My actual location is probably a few yards from those coordinates but my GPS doesn’t work inside my flat so I had to use multimap and my postcode to approximate). At time of writing, I appear to be the only site registered as being in London, but I hope this changes soon. I actually registered using the metatags for a previous standard which doesn’t seem to have taken off, but which the people at geourl are also supporting.

So why indicate where your site is? Well, the possibilities are limitless – it could enable an open source yellow pages service using this publicly available information – more precise and useful than the crude geographic groupings from the Open Directory or Yahoo. It could also help neighbors with similar interests to find each other, as UpMyStreet is doing in the UK using the UK’s fairly precise post codes.

To add a little element of Dr Strangelove to this tool, the tag geourl uses is labeled as the page’s “ICBM” value because of a little usenet in-joke.auto loans 0advantage loancredit with car loan bad a37 loan carbest credit bad loans 10 personalloan of student advantage consolidationfaxing instant 24 7 loans noloans 250000 business Mapporn abusedabsolutely porn free lesbianteenagers activities forchat adult call back sexmovie made amateur home sexmovies amature teenpublic sex amateur inerotic stories sex a Map

1 Comment »

  1. The reason you’re lonely on GeoURL is that I think you’ve got the location wrong! N51.0006 E0.0515 is somewhere near Uckfield in East Sussex.

    Using the Streetmap.co.uk link on your contact page I get 51.5516;-0.08750 (negative because you’re West of Greenwich) for you.

    Comment by Jim Hughes — 5 February 2003 @ 12:32 pm

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