Comments on: Geo-what? Oh, it’s coming to the UK soon…

By: Ben Werdmuller

Ben Werdmuller — Wed, 13 May 2009 12:33:50 +0000

Geotagging is going to come of age this year. I'm launching a tool over at OutMap.org that will allow anyone to geotag any data, as well as import/export it from/to any compatible tool. The idea is that organizations (eg newspapers) shouldn't have to repeat the underlying technological task over and over - it's been done once and everyone can benefit with very little investment. Someone could also come along and take geoRSS feeds from all the compatible newspapers and aggregate them into one map. There are lots of other tools that do other things with geotagging - Pachube does something similar for sensor data. It's all useful, and as there are already simple standards for it that everyone's using, there's a huge range of possibilities in terms of mashups and secondary tools.

By: Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog » Blog Archive » Geotagged journalism: behind Trinity Mirror’s news maps

Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:30:56 +0000

[...] last week’s Digital Editors’ Network event in Preston, Trinity Mirror’s new geotagged news maps were a popular topic of [...]

By: Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog » Blog Archive » The Guardian are ‘geolocating’

Fri, 10 Oct 2008 17:03:16 +0000

[...] Geotagged content has been around for a while now, but is starting to take effect in the UK media: last week, the Liverpool Echo, published a hyperlocal news map. [...]

By: Gerd Kamp

Gerd Kamp — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 19:28:36 +0000

Nearly two years ago i started on the mission to geo-tag the news at the german news agency dpa.

Since nearly a year we are geocoding our reginal wires. I think we are still the only news agency worldwide doing this.

I think we’ve taken most of the problems cited in the comments into account.

So we are encoding multiple locations of a single story and are distinguishing between different types of geo-tags: scopes (to which geographical area an editor deem a certain story relevant) and loci (where did something happen)

I’ve given a lightning talk about what we are doing at this years wherecamp. The slides of the talk and more detailed posts about what we are doing are available at: http://relations.ka2.de/tag/goingplaces/

By: AylmerHall

AylmerHall — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 13:44:04 +0000

Good work by the Echo, must have taken a lot of effort to make this part of the normal workflow for all content going online.
The challenges facing anyone wanting to geo-code every piece of news media they are publishing, whether it is the text, a photo, some video or a Flash graphic, are many:
- how accurate should the code be? i.e.: if the geographic reference is general, such as a city, you don’t want to use a postcode or lat/long co-ordinates that refer to a single address otherwise you could end up pin-pointing someones’ home in reference to a derogatory story, which would be a bad thing;
- with a photo do you want to tag the spot where the photographer was standing when the photo was taken (after-all, with GPS-enabled cameras or devices that automatically add the lat/long co-ordinates to the EXIF data that is what you are going to get), or the geographic details for everything in the photo?

By: links for 2008-10-07 « David Black

links for 2008-10-07 « David Black — Tue, 07 Oct 2008 22:13:06 +0000

[...] Geo-what? Oh, it’s coming to the UK soon… – Journalism.co.uk Editors' Blog "This week saw the launch of a hyperlocal news map for the Liverpool Echo, as announced by Sly Bailey at the AOP Digital Publishing Summit. It geotags news content so each user can search for news by postcode." (tags: internet newspapers newspapersites journalism local geotagging mapping trinitymirror) [...]

By: Judith Townend

Judith Townend — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 10:00:40 +0000

@James Hatts: thanks for your comment and link to your site. I’ve amended the post to indicate that the Liverpool Echo’s launch is the first effort ‘of the large publishing groups’ (though I stand to be corrected on that too, if anyone knows any other up and running examples?) – please do keep us posted with other examples over the UK, as geotagging becomes more widely used.

By: James Thornett

James Thornett — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:59:43 +0000

The simple fact is that geo-tagging news content is an extremely complex task.

Ok, it’s quite easy to add postcodes to a certain type of story – a house fire for example – but the majority of news stories are not so straightforward when it comes to referencing a particular location.

Stories often refer to more than one location, or actually refer to an area represented by a polygon rather than a point, or have elements within the story (a person or several people, a building, an organisation) that all have different locations associated with them.

And do you tag with postcodes, long/lat coordinates, county/city/town/district names, by manually selecting a dot or area on a map.

The complications are seemingly endless… but far from being pessimistic I believe this is precisely what makes this area of content delivery so fascinating.

It’s a challenge that needs some clever solutions and it will be very interesting watching different organisations and websites trying to find the answers.

By: links for 2008-10-03 | The (e)Grommet

links for 2008-10-03 | The (e)Grommet — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:04:16 +0000

[...] Journalism.co.uk Editors’ Blog » Blog Archive » Geo-what? Oh, it’s coming to the UK soon… More hyperlocal news from Trinity group – geotagging gets going. (tags: Journalism ojatcardiff Trinity Liverpool newspapers geotagging hyperlocal via:mento.info) [...]

By: James Hatts

James Hatts — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 21:00:56 +0000

We’ve been doing geotagged news for nearly three years:

http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/map