Location, Location, Location

The following is also my column in this week's AdAge.

'Geotagging' Will Bring Everyone Closer Together. Advertisers, Take Note

Technology has transformed our world and made it really small -- or, if you're a Tom Friedman fan, flat as a pancake. And if you thought things couldn't get any more intimate, they're about to, thanks to geotagging, which might change the way you buy local media in the near future.

Geotagging is the process of adding geographical data to online content created either by individuals or big media. Usually it involves integrating a Google or Yahoo map into a site and allowing users to pinpoint where they reside. Sometimes it goes a step further by letting individuals "tag" the content with the locations where their articles, photos, videos or blogs were created.

Like anything created digitally these days, geotagging becomes incredibly more valuable when information from millions of individuals is aggregated into a single view. A great place to see this in action is Flickr, one of the world's largest photo-sharing sites and a division of Yahoo. A month ago Flickr launched a feature that lets users drag their photos onto a map and identify where they were shot. In just 30 days a staggering 4.1 million photos have been geotagged by the community.

Other sites that use geotagging are helping like-minded individuals who live in the same region find each other and even connect offline. Frappr, for example, has become a hit with bloggers and podcasters.

All of this is just the beginning. In the months ahead, geotagging will become part of virtually every website you can think of -- from consumer review sites to news, blog platforms, search engines and more. It will connect disparate online sites into solidified virtual networks all based on location data.

As geotagging becomes more popular, it will open up new avenues for advertisers. For example, a marketer who wants to target influencers in the Big Apple will, in the near future, be able to easily find the most influential bloggers in New York and buy ads across all of them.

Geotagging is not just about the little guy, either. Look for big media to adopt it too. Newspaper sites, for example, could plot out all their articles on maps and let advertisers make micro buys on pages that roll up the news on a single town.

Tags: geotagging

Comments

[mike]

This is a pretty cool site for geomapping. It is a mash up with google maps (did I use the term correctly?).
http://www.wayfaring.com/
You can plot personal points, search or share by interests.

[Vera Bass]

I couldn't help expecting a real estate business analogy. :) The concept of value being where the traffic and visibility are, is so basic, of course, that I was looking forward to reading a new view here.

Not as expected, but it is a new POV for me, nevertheless, and one which highlights brilliantly one of the differences between the physical and virtual world. The population density still applies, but it can be a constantly *moving* target.
It's natural to apply the premises of a lifetime without thinking. The most popular destinations on the web aren't moving targets, so it's easy to stop there. The populations themselves, however, have a power to shift and move that does not have a RL correlation. Great food for thought.

Vera

[Karl Long]

the level of geotagging activity on flickr is amazing, and it is going to only get richer as more cameras have the ability to geotag photo's automatically. I noticed that gigaom noted the other day that the Nokia n95 has gps built in and can geotag photo's automatically. http://mobile.gigaom.com/2006/09/26/nokia-n95/

(disclosure: Nokia is a client)

[Maizal]

An interesting observation about your post: http://furbyandquackmore.blogspot.com

[Jose del Moral]

I totally agree with you. We are working on Geotagging in a local project in Bilbao and audience is increasing on a 40% monthly rate.