Geotagging blog posts

Google now added a new feature to the Blogger website which I was missing ever since I started blogging, especially once I started with my Travel blog - geotagging blog postings. A blog posting can be related to one specific location, so it makes a lot of sense adding this metainformation in a machine readable format to the posting. It not only helps users to have an easy way to get to a map of the area, it also makes it possible to search the other way round - which blog postings are related to the area I am interested in. Given the fact that Google has two great mapping tools - Google Maps and the Google Earth software, and also several other sites in the Google universe already allow to geotag contents - most notably the photo site Panoramio, but also the second photo site Picasa, even Youtube videos can be geotagged. So it was only a matter of time until they added it to Blogger, though I wished they did it earlier. Actually, it is not yet fully there, right now it is only available in the testing Blogger Draft engine, but that means I can already use it now.

I have already tagged all of the postings in my travel blog, and also in this blog all those specific for one location. For some the location is only approximate, like when I write about a specific municipality but don't know the exact location of its office which would be the best choice for a "central point". There are also few cases where I could not add a geotag yet, like the recent Muban renamed - I simply cannot find that one on any map...

Since there is still a small bug in the feed generated - the namespace for GeoRSS isn't included and thus GoogleMaps does not recognize it as a feed with geotags - the map below is created from the feed of my travel blog patched to make it show in GoogleMaps. But I am confident that this bug will be fixed soon and you can use the feeds of my blogs in whatever geographical mashups you can imagine...