The Shifted Librarian

Sunday, December 29, 2002

RSS Heaven(s) Crossed With Geographical Meta Tags

I can't remember who was looking for this, but Syndic8 shows a scraped RSS feed for the excellent Astronomy Picture of the Day. Thanks to Perceive Designs (aka Eric Vitiello Jr.) for providing it, along with a bunch of weather feeds (including Chicago)! (Note: I'm getting an "channeltitle" error when I try to subscribe to the Chicago feed in Radio's aggregator. Darn.)

Visiting their site also produced a link to the GeoURL ICBM Address Server, a site I hadn't seen before.

"GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory. This will allow you to find URLs by their proximity to a given location. Find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you."

Here's what you do:

Add meta tags
Add the following meta tags to the <head> section of your web page:

<meta name="ICBM" content="COORDINATES"> <meta name="DC.title" content="THE NAME OF YOUR SITE">Use the helper to generate your tags if you are in the US.
Coordinates are in the form of a latitude and longitude, separated by a comma, for example: 47.98481,-71.42124. Western hemisphere longitudes and Southern hemisphere latitudes are negative.
We'll also index Geo Tags-style "geo.position" meta tag as per their documentation

Tell the GeoURL server your page needs to be indexed.
Use the ping form to tell us that your page has been updated.

Tell others

GeoURL will become more useful as the database grows in size. Tell others about GeoURL by linking to us.

Once you are in the database, you can add a link to show your neighbors:
http://geourl.org/near/?p=http://my.web.site/blog/

So, I'm telling others, and I'm going to try adding the meta tags to my own site. I don't know if this attempt will go anywhere, but it might be an interesting way to identify Prairie Bloggers and other geographically-joined groups somewhere down the road.

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