14 DAY TRIAL // Location is all the rage right now, thanks, in no small part, to the growing popularity of web-enabled mobile devices with GPS features. There are a couple of rather popular location services, like Foursquares and Loopt, Google has Latitude, and even Twitter has integrated location into its service. Not wanting to be left out, blog hosting service WordPress.com announced that it would introduce location-related features as well, allowing bloggers to add geolocation data and readers to know where the posts are coming from.
“Have you ever wondered where in the world a blog post was written? Where a commenter was located? If there were other WordPress.com bloggers near you? If so, hold on to your hat, because you’re going to love the geotagging and geolocation features we’re introducing,” WordPress' Jane Wells writes. “Starting today, when you log in to write a post, you have the option of identifying your location.”
Right now WordPress.com has two means of getting the location data. It can do it semi-automatically with browsers which are location-aware, especially when running on devices with GPS features, requiring users just to double check if the data is accurate. But users can also add the data manually if the first method fails or isn't available for some reason. What it means is that posts, comments, and even profiles can have location information associated with them.
WordPress.com uses a number of formats to retrieve and serve the location data like “geo microformat, geo.position, and ICBM meta tags, and GeoRSS and W3C geodata in feeds.” However, all of this is just metadata, unreadable by us mere humans, so why bother then? Well for one, it can allow various services like search engines know the content's location using to serve it for users in the same area for example. Users can also view the data using Firefox add-ons like Operator and Geo.
The reason why WordPress.com doesn't allow users to view the data just yet is simple, there just isn't any to view yet. As soon as it has gathered enough locations to make the feature actually useful, it will develop themes which display the data, but also widgets or maps that make use of it. Further down the road, it will introduce more features like location of the commenters and a number of related tools. The first step will be a “geo search” feature which will be launched as soon as there's enough info.