With GPS (global positioning system) emerging as the must-have feature of any smart phone and PDA phone, geotagging is becoming a trend in the blogsphere, especially on location-based contents, such as blog posts on food, traveling destination and picture.

Take a look at Makantrip.com; almost every food post is described with GPS coordinate. This is undeniably the most accurate way to identify the geographical location of a dining place.

How A Reader Can Make Sense of GPS Coordinate?

As a reader, if given GPS coordinate of N3 09.469 E101 42.701, how do you make sense of it?

1. Go to Google Maps in web browser, and paste N3 09.469 E101 42.701 into the search field
2. Execute Google Earth in your computer, and paste N3 09.469 E101 42.701 into the search field (Fly To).

What do you get? Well, if you’ve done it correctly, Google should have interpreted the above mentioned coordinate, and presented you with the location map of one of the most significant landmarks in Malaysia – Petronas Twin Towers.

Make Full Use of Google Maps

The technique shown above, is assuming that a blog reader is slightly internet savvy enough to know the existence of Google Maps, and the usage of GPS coordinate to search for intended location.

Hey… don’t be surprised when you hear comment like this:

“brother… wat N S E W and the dotted numbers… I don understand the location la. You write like this might as well don write la”

Since Google Maps service is freely available, why not we make full use of the facility to further enhance our location-based contents?

Link to Google Maps

Let’s take a look at my food post on Kuala Lipis and Gua Musang. There are a total of 3 GPS coordinates in the post, each to describe Kuala Lipis Jalan Silang, Kuala Lipis Tongkok Hotel and Gua Musang GM Food Garden respectively.

Beside each GPS coordinate, I’ve included a link named “show location map”, which points to the location described on Google Maps. In this case, my readers will get a better understanding on the geographical location, by just clicking the link. Well, it doesn’t take much internet savviness to click a link isn’t it?

So what’s the format of Google Maps link?

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=latitude,longitude

Just replace latitude and longitude with the respective coordinate will do, such as http://maps.google.com/maps?q=N3+09.469,E101+42.701

If you have a coordinate in decimal degrees format, you can also compose the Google Maps link as http://maps.google.com/maps?q= 3.15782,101.71168

Besides, you can also further describe the coordinate with its location name, by appending the name in bracket into the URL, such as
http://maps.google.com/maps?q=N3+09.469,E101+42.701 (Petronas Twin Towers)

The name in bracket will be shown in pointer on Google Maps to improve readability.

Embed Google Maps as Location Map

That’s not all. You can also embed Google Maps into your content, as just what I did for Donald & Lily’s Nyonya Laksa food post. Scroll to the end of the post, and you’ll see a map.

So, why spend your time trying to draw a creative map when you can make use of Google Maps?

Geo Microformat

OK, if you think the above methods are all geotagging about, no, there are MORE.

Making use of Google Maps in your content is aimed at improving human readability, more effectively present your location-based content in ‘human’ perspective.

However, there’s another aspect – ‘machine’ perspective, that we shouldn’t neglect. For example, how can we let our web browsers understand a GPS coordinate, and seamlessly, semantically, present more related contents available to us?

As quoted from geo official site:
geo (pronounced “gee-oh”) is a simple format for marking up WGS84 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WGS84) geographic coordinates (latitude; longitude), suitable for embedding in HTML or XHTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML.

The reasoning is simple. When we write a GPS coordinate such as N3 09.469 E101 42.701 in our blog post, how can the web browser and web crawler be sure that this is actually referring to a GPS coordinate, and not something else??

So, our goal now is, to let the binary creatures know what we are writing. In this case, when we’re composing a GPS coordinate, we want the machines, such as web browser and crawlers to know that this is in fact, and for sure, a GPS coordinate.

“Please pick up this information (GPS coordinate) and do something with it.”

So, this is where standards come into play. Geo microformat is a small bit of HTML that represents geographical information.

Instead of writing something like this N3 09.469 E101 42.701 in HTML, which doesn’t carry any notation on information type, we’re going to recompose this GPS coordinate in geo microformat to achieve machine friendliness, and at the same time maintain human readability.

<div class="geo">
    <abbr class="latitude" title="3.15782">N3 09.469</abbr>
    <abbr class="longitude" title="101.71168">E101 42.701</abbr>
</div>

The above HTML codes will be rendered on browser as:

As shown in the above example, the geo microformat doesn’t introduce any new syntax, but making use of existing XHTML standards. So, it should not even break your RSS.

Please note that, the abbr tag is meant for machine to read. So, the latitude and longitude values in the abbr tags must be formatted as decimal degrees. I’m using http://www.csgnetwork.com/gpscoordconv.html to convert GPS coordinate into decimal degrees when composing geo microformat.

Now, with geo microformat, web crawlers can distinguish between a normal text and geographical notation.

Why Use Geo Microformat?

Seems like content writer got to put in a lil bit more efforts to compose the GPS coordinates in the web. Now the common question is, does it worth the efforts??

If you ask me, I would say “yes, it’s worth spending the additional 2 minutes of efforts”

Microformats are emerging. Developers around the world are giving more attentions to microformats, in alignment to the long-term goal to semantic web.

You may ignore geo microformat now, but one day if big boy like Google decided to index geo with their crawlers, then the location-based contents around the world will immediately be given another fresh perspective. Imagine a user is browsing Google Maps or Google Earth. Not only Panoramio pictures are shown, but relevant web contents described with geo are pulled as well. Isn’t it great??

Besides, do you know that Firefox 3 is also featuring built-in developer support for microformats? Web browser support is one of the main success factors of microformats, and it’s realizing now.

With Firefox Operator plugin, GPS coordinates described with geo microformat will also be automatically detected in Firefox browser, and user can choose to show the coordinate on Google Maps, MapQuest or Yahoo! Maps. Alternatively, user can also export all GPS coordinates found in the page, to KML format.

Click here to learn interesting examples of Firefox Operator with microformats.

GeoPress

So far, the most promising geotagging WordPress plugin that I’ve found, is GeoPress. It supports Google Maps embedding, location markup using geo, GeoRSS Simple output, ad etc. However, at present, it only supports 1 GPS coordinate for each post.

What are you still waiting for??

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Tags: Geotagging, Google Maps, Microformats