How the geotagging is making the world a tiny bit smaller

You might be following the adventures of Jesse in Thailand. On his blog Rationalgeocrapic.com, he's currently videoblogging and photoblogging about his trip to Thailand. When you click on his pics, you'll notice that they are hosted by Flickr and that you can actually see on a map where exactly this pic has been taken.  That's the whole concept of Geotagging: matching data and physical object with a digital map based on the GPRS-coordinates of that object in the real world.

Steve Rubel has an interesting column this week on adage about this subject. He predicts that things like Google Maps, Flickr geotagging or Frappr.com is only the beginning. 

In the months ahead, geotagging will become part of virtually every website you can think of -- from consumer review sites to news, blog platforms, search engines and more. It will connect disparate online sites into solidified virtual networks all based on location data.

As geotagging becomes more popular, it will open up new avenues for advertisers. For example, a marketer who wants to target influencers in the Big Apple will, in the near future, be able to easily find the most influential bloggers in New York and buy ads across all of them.

I see two killer applications for geotagging: The first is people: Being able to connect with people based on the insight you have about their physical position will have tremendous added value, like for instance being able to discover on a map of death metal fans, that there's actually one living in your neighborhood. The second is local community life: a city consists of an infite layers of invisible information ranging from: "where are the cool pubs", over "where are the public accessible places for disabled people", towards "where are the wifi hotspots?". Every city has it's own set of information layers that citizens can build collaboratively. I'm looking forward to doing some cool stuff with this. Check out Mechelen.mapt.be as a kickass example of what I mean (disclosure: made by my good friend Jelle and my ex-colleagues at Memori)

http://www.Micropersuasion.com/2006/09/location_lo...
http://mechelen.mapt.be