Tip: Geocode your blog

By now you may well have heard about geotagging – it’s especially popular with photographers at the moment who like to geotag their photos and overlay them on a map (cf. flickr). Another example is GeoURL, which uses location information in your website meta tags to identify it’s location. The GeoURL database can then be searched so that you can find websites near yours, for example.

Well as you may know, we’re currently working on a new version of BritBlog (yes I know, it’s taking ages….), and one of the features I’d like to have is a decent map of British bloggers. Our old one stopped working when our postcode to OS Grid Reference conversion trick broke, and it was restricted to just the UK anyway, which wasn’t great for our expats.

So I’d like to update the map, and there are lots of things we’ll be able to do. Apart from just plotting all the blogs on a map, you’ll be able to search for blogs near you, look for recently updated blogs near you, we could show all of the most recently updated blogs on a map, all the blogs talking about knitting on a map, and loads more things besides! But for this to work, we need to know where you blog from. You can tell us where you are based by geocoding your blog.

Geocode your blog

So, what I’d like to ask you to do is to start adding geo meta tags to your blog templates. You don’t have to tell us exactly where you live, but if you can do it to within a few kilometres that would be useful. Over the next few months we can gather this data and experiment with it. More details on how to do this can be found on the GeoURL web site (you may as well add yourselves to GeoURL while you are there…), but essentially you need to add the following code to the block of your web page template:

<meta name="ICBM" content="52.12345,-0.54321" />
<meta name="DC.title" content="My Blog Title" />
<meta name="geo.position" content="52.12345;-0.54321" />

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. That means if you live to the West of Greenwich, then your longitude will be negative. You actually don’t need the third line in the example above, but its good practice to put it in.

Working out your coordinates

One way to work out what your coordinates should be is to use Google maps:

• Go to Google maps and search for your location.
• When you’ve found where you live, double click on the rough spot. This will cause Google maps to re-centre on your location and zoom in a bit.
• Now click the ‘link to this page’ link on the top right of the Google maps screen.
• Grab the new URL from the address bar, and grab your coordinates! &ll=52.1234,-0.4321&spn=.

I’m sure there are other ways to work out your location; this is just one of them.

So does that make sense? I’m really keen to get this up and running, so if you have any queries about this, or if I can help at all, please either leave a comment below or drop me an email.

Finally, don’t forget the blogmeet in Surrey later this month. It’s on the 28th October in Guildford. Be there or be square

[tags]geoblogging,geocode,blogging,geourl,mapping,britblog[/tags]