Geotagging: The Return of Place

Posted by on December 05, 2006

A globalized economy and world-flattening technologies have convinced some that place is no longer as important as it once was. But new tools are helping individuals and communities understand and communicate information by tying it to the local world they constitute. The Wall Street Journal reports that photos are currently the online content that's most often geotagged: users' attaching them to maps or satellite images is "the [better] equivalent of writing the year and the names of people on the back of a photo," says Flickr co-founder Stewart Butterfield. New applications are in the mix, however, from blogs that are tagged to (and searchable by) specific zip codes to music files that are tagged to the locations where they were recorded or created.

The Economist has picked up on the new technological importance of place, too: an article on GPS details how tourist companies are using the technology to improve experiences for tourists in cities by programming their vehicles' stereos to narrate the history of a site as it's passed.

The technologies that once made "global" possible are now making "local" both easy and meaningful.