Geo-tagging

As an experiment in geo-tagging, and in hope of detecting this and other blogs using Feedmap (beta), I've registered this blog and added the following meta tags to the head of the blog template:

meta name="geo.position" content="32.7885; 130.715"
meta name="geo.region" content="JP-43"
meta name="geo.placename" content="Kumamoto, Japan"

Before you try stuff like this, however, let me remind you to backup your blog template first, and if you have more than one blog, make sure you are using the correct blog template. You shouldn't have to learn those lessons the hard way, like I do!

As Andrew Turner suggests in Geotagging Web Pages and RSS Feeds (2005.01.11) you can retrieve local latitude & longitude coordinates from Multimap, by city names, and get an International Standards Organization country code from the ISO.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-1
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_3166-2:JP

Internet searching for "ISO 3166-2, [+ country name]" should turn up codes for other locales.

I note that in Andrew's coding examples, tag closures for geo.region and geo.placename are missing (2007.04.09). Each of those tag lines must begin with a left angle bracket ("<") and end with matching right closure (" />"). I put those three lines immediately below the "head" line in the template, with the understanding that place name is optional. I'll soon see if it works.

Nope, I still couldn't update my location with Feedmap. So I've turned to Kuan Cheen's guide (2005.08.13) to find another tag of the ICBM variety:

meta name="ICBM" content="32.7885, 130.715"

I'll add that and try again....

Note that once uploaded, the template automatically redefined the tags with their elements in a different order:

meta content='32.7885, 130.715' name='ICBM'
meta content='32.7885; 130.715' name='geo.position'
meta content='JP-43' name='geo.region'
meta content='Kumamoto, Japan' name='geo.placename'

Yet each line is still enclosed with angle brackets. Let's try again with Feedmap.

Though Feedmap suggests, "If you want to update your location, simply add geo.position tags to your home page and submit it to the Ping page - it will automatically update your location"; I've done that, and I keep getting an error stating, "Unable to store blog. Please try again later. [ERROR: Value cannot be null. Parameter name: value]" - with and without the ICBM type tag.

Back to the drawing board....