[development] Place, Geotagging

Steven Clift slc at publicus.net
Tue Nov 4 18:24:16 UTC 2008


I am interested in your Drupal developer take on two related ideas:

1. Place - Many of the sites hosted on Drupal are local organizations 
with local content. What do you think of having a standard way Drupal 
(and other open source CMSes) allow sites to assign the geographic place 
name (or perhaps a point) that best represents either where their 
organization is based? How about an automatic map of Drupal sites or 
listings by hierarchical placename? Perhaps a connection to 
http://gaze.mysociety.org would work.

2. GeoTagging - What do you think of defaulting or at least having the 
ability to assign a point, bounded place, or "global" geo-tag in terms 
of the general scope of individual content items created? An option 
changeable near a save/post button.

It seems to me that as long as geotagging is an afterthought, the 
ability to aggregate/navigate much of the newer and dynamic content on 
Drupal hosted sites by geographic relevancy will be quite limited. 
Imagine the power of just a few CMSes adopting a similar way to describe 
the place of sites (which could be "earth" for those who think the 
Internet is best when viewed as narrowly "global") and even more 
granular meta-data on specific content items as a default rather than an 
add-on.

Please also reply to: clift at publicus.net

Steven Clift
http://stevenclift.com

P.S. I am gathering feedback on this idea as part of an exploration 
commissioned by a major U.S. foundation.


More information about the development mailing list