We all know it’s easy to geotag a web page and geotagging photos is pretty common. In fact the geo-wankers think that every camera should geotag photos as they are taken, which is cool with me (and some manufacturers are doing this already) but as I’ve been working more with audio and video, I wonder how geotagging should work. The reason for this is because while a photo easily represents a moment in time at a specific location, audio and video are time-based media, which may have starting points, ending points, and many points in between.
On RasterWeb! we tag each post with lat/lon values and those values also appear in the RSS 2.0 feed. This more or less works, unless I post an entry about traveling from one place to another.
Anyway, this came up because in the videoblogging group there were some thoughts about geotagging the RSS 2.0 feeds so that the items, which also contain enclosures which are videos, could be geotagged. The problem again lies in the fact that you can easily start shooting a video and start driving and end up 30 miles from where you started. Or you could shoot video with footage from many locations and prsent it all as one. Does the geodata need to be embedded within the audio/video stream?
This seems like one of those problems that we can’t easily bootstrap ourselves without manufacturers of equipment building the features into the products they design. I could be wrong on this (and hope I am) and maybe there is a hack to do it, I’m just not the one to do it right now. Still, I think it’s an interesting problem…