(Via smart mobs) Mikel Maron launched an experiment, using del.icio.us as a collaborative geo-annotation database. The basic idea is to overload the del.icio.us tags with geographic metadata, then visualize using worldKit. The webpage presents this geo.licio.us : geotagging hosted services thing. Nice hack!

This worldkit app is an experiment in using del.icio.us as a collaborative geo-annotation database.

To annotate: activate the map by mouse click. Hold "i", then click location to annotate.

The del.icio.us tags field is overloaded and stuffed with arbitrary key/value metadata; in this case, "geo:lat=* geo:long=*". This map pulls all del.icio.us entries with the additional tag geolicious. So any entry published with these tags will be plotted. Tags are published in the RSS 1.0 feed in . worldKit has been modified: now parses RSS 1.0, and will accept geotags in the dc:subject.

geo.licio.us could be like a collaborative geourl, though I'm sure proximity search would bring it to a crawl. Another problem is that the RSS feed only lists the last 30 entries.

This is a hack, but it's motivated. To get geo-annotation moving, have to go to where it's already super easy to publish. Majority of people opt for hosted services to publish links,blogs,photos. These places aren't extendable by plugins (wonder if there's any safe way to allow this) to enable clean arbitrary metadata publishing (Metadata publishing could be built in, but I'm not on the inside). So hack it. del.icio.us has tags. flickr has tags .. but they don't publish the tags in the syndicated feeds (why not flickr?). flickr geo-annotation would allow easy photo maps. typepad has a "keywords" field, but you can only directly edit the syndication feed templates at the Pro level. blogger? no idea. Come on services, let the metadata flow!