News sites should geocode
News sites need to start building information and communites around hyper-local information. Dan Froomkin, who writes washingtonpost.com's daily White House Briefing column, makes a compelling case for doing so in OJR:
"Newspapers should start appending metadata code reflecting geographic location (ideally, street address and/or longitude and latitude, but at the very least city and ZIP code) to absolutely everything.... Sure, this may require a moment of attention at the time of content creation and some technological improvements, but with geocodes we can give our readers a slice of our incredibly deep and unique content based on their very specific location.
Imagine knowing readers' locations and then being able to then show them the news stories, big and small, taking place around them and offer them information about schools, crime, restaurants, activities, homes for rent or sale, sales at stores, zoning decisions, swim meets and volunteer activities all near them -- and much more. Depending on how deep your data is, you could create a virtual representation of every street in your circulation area."
Jun 01, 2004 | E-MAIL | SAVE | PRINT | PERMALINK | DISCUSS(1)
Discussion
1 comments about 'News sites should geocode'There are a few important considerations before you start this kind of geographic tagging. First, what do you do about existing articles? If you don't do anything, it will take years before you have the critical mass of properly tagged articles to use in a serious offering. But retroactively tagging articles can be prohibitively expensive.
Second, what kind of geography-based offering makes sense? Consider that this would involve a search/retrieval based on the geographic code, which means that the search engine would have to be structure-aware (which few are today).
Third, publishers are immediately faced with the fear that this might threaten their (very meager, but non-zero) archives revenues.
I'm not saying that these are insuperable hurdles. But they are real-world considerations that, if not dealt with, will probably slow down acceptance of this kind of tagging.
Posted by Terry Steichen at June 27, 2004 9:21 AM
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