By: Tim Nash

So now more or less fully restored Hackday I thought I would introduce a few of the more interesting concepts that were being banded around the event some of which are relevant to search engines and online presence. However before getting to anything interesting I thought it was discussing some of the under pinning technologies.

Geo RSS

RSS is a family of web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a "feed," "web feed," or "channel," contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually. source: wikipedia

Georss is an extension to the standard rss which provides additional location awareness tags in their simplest form these are

<geo:lat></geo:lat> <geo:long></geo:long>

Yep that’s longitude and latitude so now an RSS node can be given a geographical location but why would you want to do this?

Yahoo amongst others have been busy adding georss to a range of products and services including maps and Flickr both are great examples of what can be done.

Yahoo maps

Yahoo map API uses georss to provide location data, simply send yahoo your xml file with the location data and it will return the relevant map imagery neat huh! lets take a simple demo node say hello Yahoo.

<item> <title>Yahoo! Sunnyvale</title> <link><![CDATA[http://developer.yahoo.com]]></link> <description>Sunnyvale Campus</description> <geo:lat>37.416384</geo:lat> <geo:long>-122.024853</geo:long> <ymaps:GroupId>yahoo</ymaps:GroupId> </item>

For more information on Yahoo maps and their API check out the Yahoo Developer network page on georss in maps.
Like Yahoo Google also support GeoRSS in their mapping services

So what’s this got to do with search?

Local really means local, I can with a little hacking bring together maps, photos and just about any information of a given location that uses Georss. For example right now you can use Upcoming Georss feeds + Flickr and Yahoo/Google maps not only to provide a series of data for a user but images of important landmarks on the way to the event, pictures from the event etc. How long will it be before search engines pick up on this idea?

For advertisers

Geo rss tagged adverts could provide highly targetted traffic, run a roadside dinner on the A1? imagine if in Google maps mashp described above your dinner was marked as the stop point...

But...

Yes there is a but, no one is tagging their data we have no means of getting all this great geo data to the api or vice versa and certainly not in real time. Well that’s all about to change...