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.
Did you notice how much complaint every person does every day? We complain about politicians, the economoy, products that don't work, overpriced gasoline, UIs that are "stupid", our lack of time, lack of money...
Are most of the people like that or just most of the people around me that are like that?
As a society have we changed and become more critical and bitter about our lives or it has been like that since Plato?
[I woke up at 5:30 AM so my brain is in some strange mode]
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(and soon to be copied by Google and MSN) is about to change the way we think about Geo-Tagging.
October, 2007