"Country-code top-level domains (or ccTLDs) can provide people with a quick and valuable clue about the location of a website—for example, ".fr" for France or ".co.jp" for Japan," explains Google software engineer Piyush Prahladka. "However, for certain top level domains like .com, .info and .org, it’s not as easy to figure out the location."

"With the new display, you no longer need to refine your search or click through the results to figure out which page is the one you’re looking for," says Prahladka. "In general, our hope is that these region tags will help searchers more quickly identify which results are most relevant to their queries."

If you wish to provide Google with the information required for getting your site’s region to show up in search results, you will need to log in to Webmaster Tools and go to Site configuration > Settings > Geographic Target. There you will be able to associate a country/region with your site.

Webmasters have been able to utilize the feature that lets them associate their sites with regions for quite some time, but that information hasn’t appeared in search results in the past.

Right now, Google is only showing region tags in results for certain domains like .com and .net. They don’t show them at all for sites that have location-specific ccTLDs (.br, .co.uk, etc.). The feature is designed to help users figure out where a site is based if that is not already clear.

It is also worth noting that Google will only show the region tags when the region associated with the site is different than the region the searcher’s query originates from. So if I search from here in the US, I will not see results that say "US", but I might see results that say "Canada".

Related Articles:

> Get More Links in Your Actual Google Results

> Google Gives Forums More Links on SERPs

> Google Improves Universal Results for Locations

There is no geotagging on Twitter.com yet, but Twitter apps will now be able to support it. So potentially, you will be able to geotag tweets and show the location from where you tweeted.

"The added information provides valuable context when reading your friends tweets and allows you to better focus in on local conversations," Twitter says in the announcement. "Now you can find out what live music is playing right now in your neighborhood or what people visiting Checkpoint Charlie are saying today about the anniversary of the Berlin Wall. These are only the beginning and we are really looking forward to seeing the creative uses emerge from the developer community."

If you’re concerned about privacy, you should note that geotagging is disabled by default for all users. You have to opt-in to use it. You can do so by going to the settings page and clicking "enable geotagging."

In addition to that, Twitter has updated its privacy policy to include geotagging, as well as to "describe the public nature" of most of what people post to Twitter. "We’ve tried to keep it short and sweet with lots of real life examples so it’s simple to read through," the company says.

The location element can make Twitter more useful in some cases.This doesn’t only apply to where a Twitterer happens to be at any given time, however. It is also helpful to know where they are from or where they reside, in some cases. This means you can find Twitterers of interest in your own town, for example. Our own Twellowhood tool (part of our Twellow service) is a great way to do this.

Related Articles:

> Is Your Neighbor On Twitter?

> Twitter to Become Location Aware

> Twitter Gives Apps Access to People Search

"When you use Blogger in draft, you’ll see an option below the post editor to ‘add location’," explains Elaine Filadelfo of Google’s Lat Long Blog Team. "If you know the exact location, you can simply enter the address, city, or zip code; if you’re blogging about the view from the top of a mountain you just hiked or don’t have a precise location, you can browse the map or turn on satellite mode and put a marker at the right spot (and the reverse geocoder will label the location for you). The geotag will appear below your published post as a link, which will open up Google Maps. The location will also be included in your blog’s RSS and Atom feeds using GeoRSS."

There are some known issues with geotagging that Brian at the Blogger in Draft blog was kind enough to address:

– The location editor is hidden behind the text field in the Edit HTML tab. Please switch to the Compose tab to view and edit locations.

– Some users are having issues with the blog post map gadget. Brian is investigating.

To learn more about the geotagging feature, I suggest reading Brian’s full post. If you are interested in finding out more about Blogger in Draft itself, this page should sum it up for you.

On the Yahoo Local & Maps Blog, Michael Lawless explains that places have been given unique Where on Earth IDs (WOEIDs).  The use of numbers, instead of letters, keeps everything "language neutral."

 Yahoo Internet Location Platform

He then continues, "[T]ag 727232 for example, is Amsterdam, and we can use the new APIs that we’re releasing to find out all sorts of relevant relationship information, including: The parent, the administrative region of Amsterdam . . . Neighbors, such as Landsmeer, Zaandam, and Watergang . . . Belong Tos, such as North Holland, Western Europe, and the Europe/Amsterdam Time Zone."

This technology should increase the usefulness of existing services like Yahoo Maps – WOEIDs can sort out the Marquettes located in Iowa, Kansas, Michigan, Nebraska, and Wisconsin.  Flickr is also bound to benefit, as the photo-sharing service’s Dan Catt discussed geotagging in detail.

As for what else happens, it’ll be (at least to some degree) up to the public.  Yahoo has encouraged developers to play with both its Internet Location Platform and Fire Eagle, so anyone with the time and skills can tinker at will.  Marshall Kirkpatrick notes, "We’re excited to see what developers come up with.  We probably won’t have to wait for long, either, since the Platform was released the day before O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference begins in Burlingame, California."

Prepare yourself, then, for a world map featuring “hot tags” – essentially words representing photos and tied to the places in which the pictures were taken.  A feature known as “Places” will operate in a similar fashion, and should provide “a zoomed-in way to explore more than 100,000 locations from around the world (cities, states, countries, regions) through interesting and recent photos, groups, tags, and featured photographers of that place.”

“Places” should also serve up info like the local time and weather, making it useful to real travelers (as opposed to those of us who are stuck behind desks and simply looking for pretty pictures).

These upgrades received a warm welcome long before they (almost) launched; Flickr fanatics will likely refresh the site throughout the day in order to catch a glimpse of them as they go live.

Both features will, by the way, be free to all Flickr users.

TechCrunch reports that they’re also premiering FireEagle, a geotagging platform. Arrington describes its use:

It is a platform for controlling people’s location information. Tell it (directly or via a third party application built on FireEagle’s APIs) where you are (give it specific lat/long, or a city name, or a zip code, etc.) and it will note your location. Alternatively, users with GPS phones (or other GPS device) could set it to periodically update FireEagle with geo information.

The other details about FireEagle:

• Written in Ruby on Rails
• Open APIs
• Developed with the help of dozens of developers—so apps should be ready at launch.

Arrington says that this service will be perfect for integration with products like Flickr for easier geotagging as well as placeblogging platforms.

Also important to note: you have full control over your privacy here—you can turn off tracking, and delete some or all of your history. Yahoo said that deleted information will be “immediately removed from their servers.”

FireEagle’s launch date hasn’t been set, but it’s expected to be out later this month.

Comments

FireEagle will, with any luck, get a new name before it is brought out of alpha testing; the current moniker seems strange and unrelated to any concrete concept.  Also, Yahoo surely doesn’t want to the guys at Firefox to get credit for this service; unlike some of Yahoo’s other offerings, FireEagle appears to have a lot of potential.

Michael Arrington writes, “It is a platform for controlling people’s location information.  Tell it (directly or via a third party application built on FireEagle’s APIs) where you are (give it specific lat/long, or a city name, or a zip code, etc.) and it will note your location.  Alternatively, users with GPS phones (or other GPS device) could set it to periodically update FireEagle with geo information.”

The usefulness of this service in combination with Flickr’s geotagging has already been noted, and developers are sure to think of a lot of other ways to have fun with concept.  Privacy will be an issue (especially given Yahoo’s recent exchange with Congress), but users should be able to control FireEagle’s tracking abilities.

According to Arrington, FireEagle – or whatever it comes to be called – will launch within the next month.

One change will see numbered pink circles getting replaced with helpful words.  “The new Flickr map will display tags that will hover over specific locations, representing interesting and newsworthy things going on there,” according to a post on Yodel Anecdotal.

And that would be enough to get some people excited – it’ll make browsing Flickr’s geotagged photos a much more straightforward affair.  A more interesting development, though, should be the release of “Places Pages.”  Photos will be grouped according to the area in which they were taken, and that’s just the starting point.

Users should be able to sort pictures according to “popular tags, relevant Flickr groups, featured photographers of that region, along with local information such as a detailed map, current time, and temperature,” writes Kakul Srivastava.

Unfortunately, it’s hard to say when all these updates will be released.  Flickr’s not likely to keep users in suspense for too long, though, so look for something to happen within the next few weeks.

What do you get when you combine Shozu mobile uploading app with YouTube, Flickr, and then throw in Geotagging too??

Well, you get a kick-ass application that any smartphone would be an idiot to ndo without! Shozu has recently added all this capability to their latest and its amazing.

Here’s some more details from Shozu (announcement made at 3GSM)… ShoZu Adds Geotagging for Flickr, YouTube & 5 Other Sites – the Share-It one-click image uploading service now offers location tagging for photos and video clips sent from GPS-enabled phones to Flickr and YouTube as well as Buzznet, Dada.net, moblogUK, Pikeo and Textamerica.

ShoZu is the only upload service that provides automatic geotagging for cameraphone uploads to more than one Internet destination.

It also supports more GPS handsets than any other provider.

With the new geotagging feature, GPS-enabled handsets equipped with the ShoZu application can attach latitude and longitude information to images automatically upon capture.

ShoZu will then send this information to any Share-It destination that supports tagging, along with all other tags the user has created manually. In the case of Flickr, uploaded images will also be displayed automatically in their precise location on the user’s Flickr map.

For users, geotags make it possible to search community photo repositories by geographical location just as they would search by any other tag, whether to explore a vacation destination, find photos of a certain city or area that contributors have failed to tag with location information, or simply hunt for users with common interests.

Non-Flickr users who want mapping capabilities can pinpoint the exact location of geotagged photos of interest by pasting the geotags into an application like Google Earth. THIS IS SWEET! see www.shozu.com

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Anything Geospatial: Tracking developments affecting GIS, geospatial technologies, location-based services, mapping, google earth and google maps. Published by the creator and editor of GISuser.com & LBSzone.com

The FlickrBlog has provided a couple of tutorials, which also features screenshots of the geotags in action. They’re a fairly intuitive feature, but there’s a lengthy list of explanations in the event users need something cleared up. There are also “official help and bug topics in case you have any problems.”

User-friendliness appears to have been a priority. “In the upper right corner you can search for locations – city names, airport codes, US zipcodes and postal codes in several other countries, street addresses (US/Canada only for now, but more soon), many landmarks and points of interest worldwide, even names of neighborhoods in larger cities around the world.” Also, “you drag multiple photos at once for quick mass-geotagging.”

The geotags have received a warm welcome. Dafydd Llyr Pearson wrote in his blog, “I’ve waited for this feature for such a very very long time . . . . You have no idea how pleased I am with this.”

Steve Lacey, “an Englishman in Seattle,” echoed the sentiment. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this, and finally it’s here,” he wrote. “Expect to see a lot of location based image mashups appearing very soon.”

By adding geotagging, Flickr has accomplished something directly related to its second main goal: “to enable new ways of organizing photos.” This feature isn’t debuting here, of course, but I still think it counts.

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