GeoRSS Weblog

In my presentation at Where 2.0, I warned that my brief survey of support would be out of date by the end of the conference. I talked to many folks about GeoRSS, and so many had plans to implement, cause it is simply so easy that not supporting it would be more work! Here’s a few GeoRSS developments I noticed coming out of Where..

• GeoTagThings, “a simple way to assign any web resource - anything with a url - a location in the normal, human physical world”, launched with GeoRSS support.
• Flagr added GeoRSS to its feeds.
• Plazes quietly added GeoRSS to some of its feeds, and has more complete support across their service in the works.
• VirtualEarth is pushing forward its support of GeoRSS, and has even reborrowed my borrowed hype about “GeoRSS as the Unix pipe of Geo data”
• Yahoo, at their lunch meetup, mentioned they are looking into GeoRSS export from their API .. a step towards unlocking data from all the AJAX based mashups out there, that I’ve been pushing for a while.
  

PlaceDB is another GeoRSS aggregation site which also geocodes news feeds. It uses the Geonames site to do the geocoding and is sponsored by Platial.

PlaceDB: Detroit Metro Area News

Presumably they’ve already built up a list of over 1750 feeds aggregated together, although viewing the feeds seems to show some problems. In addition, the UI requires some serious work to find your lat/lon and bounds.

But it is still a great little utility for getting local news and GeoRSS feeds.

Published GeoRSS feeds have been steadily increasing out there, but a new service launched this week potentially bumps up the number of GeoRSS feeds by an order of magnitude.

Geonames RSS to GeoRSS converter reads the entries of any RSS feed, and uses the Geonames database to determine any location referenced in the text. It then publishes a GeoRSS feed in the flavor of your choosing, for subscription or visualization.

Geographic search on regular text is a notoriously hard problem; pity the poor folks of London, Ontario. And this is far from the first attempt at it: there are whole companies hard at work, and many a web project like the 2002 Google Programming Contest Winner and mappr geosearch for flickr. Geonames is distinguished by a database built entirely from collected public domain geodata, made editable in a Wikipedia like fashion, and bridges to GeoRSS: Geonames has also released the GeoRSS library for Java.

My events feed for Cambridge (Massachusetts, not UK) is starting to look good, and the geographic tags are pretty accurate.

Here’s a pic of what it looks like in the Mac OS X aggregator NetNewsWire. Notice the nice way NNW automagically handles Atom 1.0’s <link> tag with a “via” attribute.