WordPress And Geo Tagging

[Jeffro]

So the folks at Automattic lived up to their promise of bringing the Geo Tagging solution for WordPress.com into a self hosted WordPress plugin. Good on them. However, what is the point of geo tagging? Why does it matter where a post was published from? Can anyone give me some good examples as to why this is useful?

http://iphone.wordpress.org/2010/05/...gin-wordpress/

[rzen]

I can think of one practical application where this would be particularly useful: a travel blog. Automagically tag all of your posts with your current location... adapt the code into your theme to make it more prominent, etc.

For your average every-day site, though, probably not as useful.

[MRQ]

From a day to day perspective I view Geo tagging as more of a security risk than an 'enhancement'. If I know where a blogger lives & suddenly I'm being told they're on the other side of the world then I know who's house to raid that night ;).

For a travel log or for people writing about local news then geo tagging can effectively 'verify' the author as someone experiencing first hand rather than watching Fox News

:)

EDIT:

I can think of one practical application where this would be particularly useful: a travel blog.

great minds think alike!

[zamoose]

Combine the geotagging with HookPress and Twitter/Foursquare/Gowalla's GeoAPIs and you've got a one-stop shop for updating your blog, sending out Twitter notifications of the post and checking in to whatever spot you posted from. Plus you could integrate with Flickr to upload photos and automatically geotag them as well...

[andrea_r]

If I know where a blogger lives & suddenly I'm being told they're on the other side of the world then I know who's house to raid that night ;).

I tweet when I'm going to the library or the grocery store, but that doesn't mean my house is empty. ;)

(but like I think you're saying, use your brain)

[Devin]

I see it being more useful for search. Perhaps you want to see all blogs pertaining to food in a certain region of the country. Or perhaps you're interested in reading what people are posting in a certain neighborhood.

I know it's not activated yet, but it would also be cool to know where users are leaving comments from. Perhaps it's someone in your community and you don't them, or perhaps its someone in another part of the world. It opens up new possibilities for interaction.

By the way, I'm in Sebastopol, California right now- but I live in Portland, Oregon.

[m_smalley]

I work with a company who are sponsoring an up-coming WordCamp - http://wordcamp.my - on May the 22nd, we'll be helping out with the first ever WordCamp Malaysia and will be giving a presentation on Geo-Tagging with BuddyPress - where we will be making the following connections:

WordPress is to CMS as BuddyPress is to CRM

It can be a little difficult to think of creative ways to use WordPress (as a blog) in combination with geo-tagging, other than for travel logs and general social-media updates, but when you re-focus on WordPress as a CMS, a lot of possibilities are opened-up, where pages can be used for Products or Locations, and posts can be for Staff or Sponsors - as a CMS there are countless ways to use geo-tagging.

When you apply that same form of thinking to BuddyPress and start looking at it as a CRM as well as an added social-layer, things can get really exciting, especially with geo-tagging.

As soon as we have done our presentation at WordCamp in May, we will send a link to Jeff to show him how things went - am a bit worried about showcasing too much information here as it's associated with the company I work with and may conflict against some of the rules laid-out by Jeff in regards to posting links to commercial entities...

Nonetheless, I can say that we have a lot planned for geo-tagging and BuddyPress, and Automattic's involvement with their new geo-location plugin and functionality for iPhones and BlackBerrys make it all the more interesting...

[m_smalley]

As promised, here's the link to our BRIEF presentation on "Geo-Tagging with BuddyPress" - http://thepremiumpress.com/blog/2010...th-buddypress/ - which took place at WordCamp Malaysia 2010 - the first ever WordCamp in Malaysia!

It would be great if WP Tavern could give a shout-out to the guys who organized the event - http://wordcamp.my as it would be nice to hear of international WordPress news and events from this site along with stuff taking place in the states.

We had guest appearances from Matt and Andy (via pre recorded videos) and Naoko McCracken from Automattic gave the keynote.

It was extremely inspiring being a part of it all and am very much looking forward to many more WordCamp to come! :-)

[Otto]

It would be far more useful if that plugin added proper geo location support to the RSS and ATOM feeds. A geo plugin that doesn't geotag your feeds is indeed rather useless.

[m_smalley]

Otto - what plugin are you talking about...?

Are you talking about Automattic's Geolocation plugin or gMaps, by ThePremiumPress...?

At the moment, gMaps is just a theme, and everything is self contained within that theme. One of the theme's functions is that it add geoRSS to the posts, comments and BP activity feeds - to be honest, I haven't checked Geolocation out properly to see what it does to the feeds, but am surprised if it's that that you are talking about that does not have geo-tagged RSS feeds - that would be disappointing.