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A week or so ago Dan Schultz posted here about the potential for geotagging.
Technically, the basics of geotagging is coming along: the Drupal shop Development Seed announced today "We Will Geocode Anything," using a news-tagging service and a Python script to add locations to news stories. (This is part of their larger project Managing News.)
Dan, however, outlined a list of things he needed for geotagging news to be exciting. A commenter on his blog reiterated that the ability to geographically tag things by region or a shape drawn on the map (and defined by multiple pairs of coordinates) was necessary.
My question: why wait? What's to stop us from doing cool things with geotagged news with Drupal or other existing free software tools?
I look forward to Dan elaborating on each of his points. (These were: users' areas of interest, regions, non-geographic news, topical organization, multiple location news, and a great interface.) And I hope he will give his thoughts on additions like Paul Lamb's - user-contributed news - or my own - make it democratic! But I really hope Dan will also engage directly with what new tools available to all, like Development Seed's Managing News, and let us know how they stack up. (In other words, to do my Agaric-related Drupal research for me. But don't tell him that.)
Drupal can do most everything on Dan's list, if having shapes is a frill (and Drupal's working on that), so let's start thinking about what kind of communities we want our technology to foster- and even start doing it.
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