|
newschallenge.org
Knight News Challenge grantee Lisa Williams wants to make finding local content simpler and more effective. |
Anyone who spends time online realizes that it often is surprisingly difficult to find content related to a specific location, such as a town or a neighborhood. Sometimes even identifying local newspapers can be a challenge. That challenge increases when you try to identify bloggers writing from or about a specific locale.
In the introduction to a May 30 interview piece, MediaShift's Mark Glaser observed: "For the past few years, bloggers have been living in a keyword-based world. When they write a blog post, they can tag the post by putting it into relevant topical categories. ...But the missing element for bloggers has been a way to tag their posts according to geography -- not only of the topic but of the place where the blogger is writing."
Glaser then went on to interview Lisa Williams, founder of the community site H2Otown and the aggregator Placeblogger. Williams just won a $220,000, two-year Knight News Challenge grant, which she will use to promote "universal geotagging" in blogs.
Geotagging is when you layer geographic identifiers ("metadata") to content such as Web sites/pages, feeds, articles, podcasts, or photos. Usually this metadata includes latitude and longitude coordinates, but it can also include altitude, place names, landmarks, and zip codes. When content is "tagged" with geographic metadata, it becomes easier to find with a simple search.
| RECENTLY IN NEWS CHALLENGE SERIES
|
| |
The problem is, right now geotagging is neither as simple or uniform as it could (or should) be. Williams told Glaser, "It's easy for us to find things at the blog level but harder for us to find things at the [blog] post level. There's an increasing amount of geotagged data, but it's not super-easy for bloggers to have on their platform. So if they can't tag it, then I can't find it.
"A lot of people have tried the rocket-science approach to geographical search, natural language, and that hasn't got us very far. If we want this to work, we need some help from the [content creators]. And if we want their help, we have to be super-polite about requirements and make it super-easy and fun. Since we have funding, I'm writing up a [technical specification and] circulating it to a small number of people."
Ultimately, Williams hopes her efforts to make geotagging simple and uniform will benefit not only bloggers, but news outlets -- especially small community newspapers and other local media.
She told Glaser: "I hope I don't stop working for newspapers entirely because one of the things that's so important is getting [this tool] into the hands of local publications. They should be able to play the game too. They've been kind of shut out technologically because they have these big legacy investments."
This approach also might strengthen the local ad base for both local blogs and news outlets. Said Willliams, "A keyword-based world favors a weblog like Engadget, but it doesn't favor local publications. The Google ads on H2otown are terrible. They're all real estate ads. If you have a big set of geotagged information, I would bet advertising will follow, the same way they followed keyword advertising. That would level the playing field between topic-based, keyword-based media and locally based, geographically based media."
Amy, My cousin Becky is using an interesting travel blog...
