For all who Planet Switzerland is not local enough, we just added a new feature: Search by city or canton. Some examples

city:Zürich
city:Bern
city:Sankt Gallen
canton:Zürich
canton:Bern
canton:Sankt Gallen

and also by country: country:Switzerland

And you can see the geo information for each blog, if you click on "More Info on this post".

Technically, we check the Blog html start-page for <meta name="ICBM" content="" /> or name="geo.position" and insert that into the DB. After that, we search for the appropriate city with the help of OpenGeoDB, which should have coordinates for all Swiss (and German) cities and save that in the DB as well.

This means, that only blogs show up on "location-search", who have those meta-tags on their homepage, even if you search for "country:Switzerland". And all blogs located in foreign countries do not show up either, since we don't have data for those (except Germany, but there's no blog up north with geodata), not even for Peru :). There are currently 167 blogs with geodata and 156 of them were "located".

Since OpenGeoDB only has one "point" per city, there are cases, where the city is wrong (eg, if you live nearer to the centre of the neighbor-town than to your hometown). If that's the case for your blog, please report this to us and we can fix it (we just add another point to the GeoDB). As mentioned above, you can check the town we assigned to you with "More Info on this post".

We also currently don't parse the RSS feed for geo location data. That will come later, and then each post can be on a different place.

How to add the meta-data to your blog is written on a blog-post by Alain. And another use of those data can be seen on the SLUG - Blog Map.

And as always, if you have more ideas, what could be done with that, just tell us :)

Philipp Keller @ 28.02.2006 18:30 CEST
Wow.. this is teh r0x0r..! :-)
Now I've added the metadata to my blog. When will my blog be "reindexed"?

And: Shame to Patrice that he didn't have geodata in his blog in Peru.. :-)

chregu @ 28.02.2006 18:36 CEST
It will be reindexed every night.

And Patrice does have geodata on his blog, we just don't have the reverse data for Peru (lat/long to location) :) See http://planet.blogug.ch/search/site:weblog.patrice.ch and click on "More Info", there are the coordinates for his place in Peru.

Patrice @ 28.02.2006 23:38 CEST
Cool feature!

And a pity you don't have any Peru data. What will happen when I change my geo-position back to St.Gallen. Will only the new articles be put into St.Gallen or all the past ones as well? The former would be the correct behaviour IMHO.

chregu @ 28.02.2006 23:46 CEST
Currently, it only displays the geo info of your current location, the info show is therefore more a "general blog info", than a "post info".

As said in the announcement, we don't save the data "per-entry", but I didn't even think of saving the meta-"ICBM" data to each blog post (but only the special RSS geo tags, eg. our blog has), so thanks for the hint and will be added soon.

Philipp Keller @ 01.03.2006 11:07 CEST
What would be cool is to have an RSS feed of all posts relating to "what's happening in Zurich". This would be an alternative to reading the local newspapers.

The swiss blogger scene would have to have consensus on how to tag those items but probably this consensus could be proposed by blogug?

Sure I can just subscribe to http://planet.blogug.ch/tag/zurich but Zurich could also mean "Kanton Zurich" or "Züridüütsch". If a city:zurich would be proposed and the link to http://planet.blogug.ch/tag/city:zurich would be put at a prominent location, this could help..?

chregu @ 01.03.2006 13:00 CEST
Yes, cool idea. Build your own Blogger-News-Paper :) With news, reviews, "ausgehtipps", classifieds and all that, just tag it correctly and it will show up.

The main problem, as you see it as well, is to get a common tagging system. Edgeio has some ideas in that regard: http://www.edgeio.com/view/faq/#othertags

One thing to note is also, that it's a difference from *where* you blog (that's what the new location search implemented in the Planet does) and about *what* you blog. But as said, the later could be implemented with a common tag system.

Nice idea, anyway, but somehow will be hard to convince bloggers to use a "common" tag system.

Patrice @ 01.03.2006 22:05 CEST
One could of course parse the hCalender microformat to get information about location.

Or alternatively use tags in the form "in:city" for tagging something with that. The tag in:st.gallen (or "in:st. gallen" - with spaces) would therefore indicate that this happened in St. Gallen. Or alternatively just "St. Gallen"... :)

chregu @ 01.03.2006 23:00 CEST
microformats are nice in theory, but I doubt they will gain widespread use.

At least not as long as there's not a nice input-interface in the major blogging tools by default. And even then, it's too much additional information one has to provide, without much immediate advantage for the blogger. What makes blogging easy nowadays is, that I just can type ahead and don't have to think about "complicated" formates, which maybe fit into a data model :)

Tagging of course needs also more input from the blogger than just text, but it's much more "free"-text and therefore easier to type in

Just my IMHO, it be nice, if microformats would be used more widespread, but even I am often too lazy to use similar things... But OTOH tagging is super-easy with Ecto :)

David @ 02.03.2006 12:14 CEST
Should I post requests for a new citiy in the OpenGeoDB here or do you prefer a different channel?

chregu @ 02.03.2006 15:07 CEST
If the city is missing totally, you should report that to GeoDB itself, if our program just assigned you wrong, you can report it here.

David @ 02.03.2006 17:50 CEST
Ok, as my city is missing I will turn to OpenGeoDB directly, but wait a little longer until they have their web interface up and running...

chregu @ 02.03.2006 17:59 CEST
you can still tell us, and we will temporarly fix it in our DB :)

David @ 01.08.2006 13:24 CEST
Did you have a look at geonames.org. To me it seems a viable alternative to the OpenGeoDB, as it offers a nice webservice interface and the update of the database is way easier than on OpenGeoDB.

chregu @ 01.08.2006 13:32 CEST
Yeah, looked at it and even used it somewhere.
Not sure, if the data is better than with OpenGeoDB, didn't test it.

But why is the update of the database way easier?

Anthony @ 27.12.2006 12:36 CEST
Hmm, all this Geo stuff has me confused, anyone know of a good site to simplify it a little?