Geotagging news: A thought process of GoogleMaps for news articles
Uno as Ideas, Products, South Africa, Web2.0
Jul|3|2007
You know how you get the geotagging for photos? You take a photo, you upload it to Flickr, smack some geo-tagging on it and there you go. You have a great visual representation of all the photo’s
So this is a great example of a Web2.0. But why stop there? My little mind went a-running. How often has it occured to you, you have no idea where a story is, or you want to get the news most relevant to your neighbourhood. Introducing…
Newsmaps
So what was my idea here? Well, basically just as it says there.
Journalist:
- A journalist uploads an article to go through the publishing workflow.
- They see a little GoogleMap that they scroll through to find the spot that the article references, like a sporting event, crime scene, car crash, wedding, awards ceremony, etc etc.
- The click a little pin button to locate the item.
- All this is recorded in the meta-data of the article.
News viewer:
- On the home page, a viewer zooms in to say Cape Town.
- Viewer then sees a bunch of pins that locate different news stories.
- A bunch of check boxes on the side let you pick if you want to see the different sections like Sport, Arts, Crime, etc.
Mitchell and I quickly did a few sketches and jotted some ideas down. Easy. A viewer can now see any stories directly around them, so if they want to get hyper-local content they can do this through zooming down to city level, suburb level and even street level (room level for the siblings?). This wouldn’t be difficult to create. It’s really just tagging the stories you have already. So it’s a matter of creating a new table field in your Upload Content section, and the rest happens through the RSS feed and GoogleMaps API. Why hasn’t this been done before? So now the research starts. As Tyler Reed mentioned in his podcast, everything has been done before. The main thing now is to get your execution right. Let’s go through my research process. I have saved my entire browsing history through my Del.icio.us account, which is open for you to check out, but i’ll be going through the entire process here. First, I Googled for “Geo Tagging news articles newspaper mashup” and whatever other strings I could think of.
The results returned were mostly for Flickr and photo tagging. Something that makes sense seeing that you get cameras with Geotagging ability. But remember, I’m not thinking of Photo-mashups, these there are many of. I want to do a mashup with the articles. So ISO I head over to TechCrunch. They cover the Flickr mashup and will maybe have some info on other related sites that might do Article Geo-tagging. Hrm, not much info there, except maybe for someone in the comments mentioning Locr,
which has a pretty slick interface, but no real article tagging, and not as newsroom driven as I have in mind. At this stage I have a couple of tabs open, Webware (another great web resource), Mashable (which only covers Flickr really, and not much else on Geo-tagging) and of course Wikipedia (to tell me a bit more about Geo-tagging in general.) None really have what I want. See somethings that come close.
At this stage I come across Placeblogger. I think finally! My search is over! Someone has done it! But alas no, once again they don’t have the newsroom focus that I was thinking of. This needs to be a tool directed to news-houses like news24.com, Die Burger, IOL, New York Times, or any other big production house (I’d like to see The Onion doing this…). Placeblogger mainly focuses on gathering a bunch of blogs and tagging the location of the author rather than each single post. It also doesn’t have the map-centric view. You need to click through to view maps etc. It’s a bit of a mission. I want a single map that shows me the latest posts (I can select Day, Week, Month view etc).
Newsmap! The name sounds good… my quest is over.
Unfortunatey not once again.. This mashup only has the keywords used in Google News and then mashes that up. I want a map dammit. Still a very cool concept and something that you can play with nicely.
Jackpot! And it’s local!
Some search directs me to the Muti news map! I make one or two clicks somewhere in America (I reckon there would be more stories), but no pins pop-up… Where are the pins? I want specific hyper-local pins that show me what’s happening in New York. But nothing…. our Web2.0 startup from South Africa let me down…
This is exacty what I want… there’s everything in the Mashup I could want…
From SkyNews of all places!
Last month, Sky News added an interactive map to its website, featuring some of Britain’s most wanted fugitives from justice. One fugitive appearing on the site was swiftly identified and arrested following the launch of the site.Sky News’ online map was the first interactive Google Map created with NewsMap, a tool produced for “a few thousand pounds” by Puffbox, a consultancy in Newbury headed by former Sky News website staffer Simon Dickson.
My research ends here... But now that I have the keywords I can find similar sites… 
It seems as if the BBC has their own version of it, although the Puffbox one seems a lot more intuitive to use, and it has a pretty nifty interface (remember usability). 
Gothamist has a similar attempt at the idea, although they might also want to take a look at usability. It also looks like some articles aren’t covered. Take a look over at Simon Dickson’s blog to have better understanding of the Newsmap tool. So that’s my thought process behind getting research done for a new concept. It’s mighty sketchy at this stage, and it seems like it went pretty quickly. Luckily there are some great tools for finding out about new products and ideas on the web. Resources like Wikipedia, Mashable, Webware, Read/Write/Web and Techcrunch have made research ridiculously easy. And not to mention Google.
But now the question remains…
How long until a news company in South Africa adopts this Web2.0 approach to their news? It’s only a matter of time before all newsrooms will have this as standard. Web2.0 is not all about User Generated Content. It’s also about using different resources and more importantly opening your system and adopting open standards. Take a look at the Salesforce Googlemaps mashup. This is also where Enterprise2.0 becomes important. Taking existing data and meshing it in with other data to create new meaning and opportunities or make existing data easier to interpret.
Btw, the Newsmaps Mashup was launched on the 28th of June 2007, roundabout the same time that I had the idea for this. I have no idea if I saw this on a website somewhere, although I don’t recall it. I’m claiming the South African innovation approach, even if it was done before 
Technorati Tags: newsmap, web2.0, media2.0, googlemaps, mashup, geo tagging, newspaper, newsroom, digital, trends, innovation
15 Responses
Johann Schwella
03|Jul|2007One matters like these I follow the philosophy of “build it and they will come”. Uno, I think if you develop this properly and use your connections (of which you seem to have many) it seems like something that would be super useful and pretty ground breaking.
Good work and good article!
Tyler
03|Jul|2007Hey Uno
I like the idea. It’s something that has been on my mind for a while as well. Another idea with Geotagging could be Crime-tagging. Tagging crimes based on location. It could even lead to discovery of crime patterns and so forth.
Any way, Neville did something similar, but not quite exact, a while ago so perhaps speak to him. Muti Newsmap
Johann Schwella
03|Jul|2007Muti Newsmap us ugly.
Uno
03|Jul|2007Yeah, Muti news isn’t really what I was thinking (Tyler, you read the article? I mentioned Muti News in it…)
What irks me is that this is so easy to implement… and it isn’t being done!
Neville Newey
03|Jul|2007Hi Uno
Thanks for your mention of Muti’s Newsmap. As regards the ‘pins’ that you say are missing, Muti newsmap actually works in the opposite way. (There are already many newsmap type sites that display “pins” of the news item that you click on.) With Muti newsmap the idea is that YOU click anywhere on the map and it displays news for the area that you clicked on. It is an experimental site, but continues to be very popular getting many thousands of users daily from all around the world and a lot of positive feedback (Take a look for example at the comments in del.icio.us)
I would love to work on any other similar ideas though, so if you are serious, ping me
Tyler
03|Jul|2007Uno I know it wasn’t what you were thinking.. just mentioned it. I didn’t read the full article, read bits and pieces that stood out.. Google Reader fills up to quickly
Loet
12|Jul|2007Hi Uno
Great thinking, and you are spot-on, this is the future.
We have written a local mapping system and our phase 2 maps currently power the likes of mweb, brabys, ananzi, MG etc but our phase 3 maps are in beta (go check out http://www.streetmaps.co.za and this is EXACTLY one of the type of projects we will run on our mapping.
Thanks for the interesting read.
Loet
Product: Sharing your ideas at Uno de Waal
03|Aug|2007[…] Tyler started the post and Stefan followed up on it.The conversation centers around sharing your ideas. You get an idea, you ask some people about, or you blog about. I’m totally all for this. I’ve blogged about many ideas, the latest one being about geo-tagging articles. […]
Ian Wilker
10|Sep|2007Great post — found this (and your blog, which I’ve added to my newsreader) as I was hunting something very similar.
I was hoping to find evidence that someone is working on a mapped-newsroom mashup service — something based on Yahoo or Google Maps a global news organization (Associated Press, Reuters or possibly the NYTimes/IHT) to provide global geotagged news.
- View it on the mashup site (a Frappr-type deal)
- Embed it on your own site, via widget or API.
- Use content to create additional metadata, so that a *paying* user of the service can extract tag-based filter of the newsfeed, using as many keywords as user desires (and perhaps ability to weight tags within the user-created filter — more weight if keyword appears in title or first paragraph, etc.
This last has been a feature of news-syndication services since 1997 or so — for most of the last decade I’ve been using a service that began as a product from a company called Screaming Media, long since swallowed up by a succession of media companies. (Now part of Dow Jones’ MarketWatch, I believe.) MarketWatch has tons of news sources aggregated… if they’d just add geotags to their content, they’d be able to offer exactly what I’m describing.
Ah well. Someone will make this happen, and soon.
Uno
11|Sep|2007Hey Ian, thanks for stopping by. There seems to be quite an amount of services that offer this kind of support - there is for e.g. a wordpress plugin that you can geo-tag your articles with.
If I understand correctly you are looking for something slightly more complex though?
Ian Wilker
11|Sep|2007Uno - If I read you right you’re thinking it wouldn’t be too hard to create such a service — that there are tools that make geotagging content as simple as sticking a thumbtack in a map, and that’s something any reporter or editor could do as they’re submitting content. (Increasingly, it’s automated — location-aware cameras that write geotags into each image’s metadata are one example.) And I agree — it’s pretty low-hanging fruit for a major news organization to start geotagging content, which would create a whole new array of syndication opportunities for them. I expect we’ll see such companies do this before too long.
What I’m looking for, though, is to be a customer of such a service. I’d love to be able to give users of some of the sites I work on a map-based view of fresh news, with a filter applied so that you’re only displaying stories that are relevant to the site’s subject, and from trusted news sources like A.P., Reuters, or NY Times.
Jaxon Rice
28|Oct|2007Hi Uno
I am a long time reader of your blog but somehow I missed this article when it came out.
I know I am way late to this conversation, but I just wanted to let you know I am in total agreement with you. I have been thinking about exactly this for a while now, and it astonishes me that more news organisations haven’t jumped on the bandwagon and geotagged their articles. Hyper-local content is becoming more and more relevant and this would be an ideal opportunity for a local media group to get a jump on all the others.
Can’t you use your influence at 24.com to persuade them to do it? I am developing a mashup that I would love to have local geotagged news for.
Btw, you are the number one result for “geotagged news” on Google. Nice work.
Uno
31|Oct|2007Hey Jaxon,
my SEO ski||z are coming along 
thanks for commenting. Yeah I’ve mentioned geotagging to the people who are involved with it, but the CMS that they use apparently doesn’t allow for that kind of importing data, even though it would be a simple step!
Thanks for the heads up
@Ian: If news agencies start tagging their news then that would open up the possibility to mash the data up and create those kinds of customer centric data. You’d be able to pull all the feeds from wherever, drop them into a map and then there you go!
M.U.
19|Dec|2007Hi Uno,
Just what i had on my mind when i googled “geotagging news”. I was searching for a mashup where latest news pops up on a google like map on the right place. And that you’re able to zoom into certain areas to get more local news, almost to street level. I’ll check the links to find what’s possible now…and inform a little with my friends
Regards,
Emiel
Printed Matters » Geotagging the news
13|May|2008[…] be fair, I am far from the first to think along these lines, as a quick Google on the title of my post shows. But I think the concept of treating the events as […]
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