MondayLunchCrew: geotagging

Thursday, October 05, 2006

geotagging

One of the tagging trends that I enjoy right now is geotagging. The ideal way to do this is to have GPS devices that will record the precise locations for the application in question. But most of us don't have that, and it's perhaps something we'll see more of in the days to come. So, for now, most people and applications require that you manually geotag. But while the trend of it is new, the geotag is really much like any other tag, just some metadata. When one looks at a product which has had a lot of client interaction, it's really a nice sign of folksonomy at work (ex, del.icio.us). But we're perhaps not quite there yet on the geotag side. It's only a matter of time.

We've got geobloggers and geotagged photos. Flickr has recently announced their map product. It is my first indepth exposure to geotag. (Previous one is the Team Canada on Frapper!. Geotagging people.) While yahoo! maps is lacking compared to google maps, it is nicely integrated with the flickr application. I got started on it just about when it went online and I've seen the product improve in the short time it's live. My map. I do echo a lot of the other critism of the 'features' or 'bugs' about the map feature. One can hope flickr is listening and is working on fixing the issues. I'm pretty convinced that they will, given how they have quickly fixed some of the most annoying early problems.

Since privacy is of course of issue, considered bigger or smaller depending on who one speaks with... I actually prefer the ability to be able to control how specific to geotag a location. I do plan on going back and adding more photos to my flickr pages and being more specific about locations. I'd specially like to see how a location is photographed by different people, but how we can record the changes to a location over time. Of course, that's really the next dimension to something like a flickr map feature, to be able to then view and filter the pages by date and get a layered time progression. Note: The maps will allow you to filter a map by date. But we do not yet have enough photos over time to take full advantage of the filter. I'm really looking forward to seeing more photos being geotagged over time.