Brave Tech World

May 15, 2008

    Anyone knows a website that does Geo-tagging? Flickr, perhaps? Zooomr? Every photo sharing service? Wrong. They call it geo-tagging, but it's not. They are just attaching a Lat-Long number to a picture and that is it.

    I believe the new service provided by Yahoo Internet Location Platform (and soon to be copied by Google and MSN) is about to change the way we think about Geo-Tagging.

    Think about this scenario. I upload my Europe trip pictures to Flickr and put all of them on the map (or I used a camera that has GPS coordinates). Now I want to see the pictures on a map... Easy! Now I want to see all pictures in "Paris". Gulp! I can't, because the damn geo-tagging doesn't convert those Lat-Long numbers into named locations.

    I tried to implement Geo-Tagging for Sampa in 2006, but never finished the feature after 6 weeks of development. The reality is that Geo-Tagging done right is much, much harder than writing 10 lines of Javascript and putting it on a Google Map.

    Locations as we think about them are regions (polygons) that overlap each other, they have hierarchy, multiple names, convert to map coordinates and to names. Paris is a region, so is France, so is Europe. But Paris is also a name of a city in Texas, and Paris in France might have a nickname ("city of lights"). How do you handle that? And how do you handle where the picture was taken versus of what it was taken? I might be in Manhattan, but if I took a picture of Brooklin, what is the geo-tag?

    Ready for more? What if I want to geo-tag my house, give it the coordinate and call it "House"? That geo-tag is specific to me only, and that should be ok.

    So far, I have not seen any service that "got it", but I think we are about to change a corner on web 2.0 "geo-tagging" technology and I'm very excited about it.

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