Outside.in announced improved support for bloggers who occasionally “placeblog” or write about a specific spot. Most blogs are not full-time placeblogs like h2otown, but occasionally have localized content. I chatted with them back in April, and heard back that you could make a specific feed, submit each post individually to outside.in, or wait because they were working on it. Now they have four ways to get posts tagged with a location. I’ve started using a WordPress plugin called GeoPress to add GeoRSS tags to my Atom feed which outside.in picks up. (“RSS” is the new Kleenex, dontchaknow.) The plugin can plot of the post on a Google/Yahoo map (once you get an API key), that you could include in your blog post.
The most interesting part of Fred’s write-up was his mention of their upcoming distribution deals:
...it will be there in at least an hour or two and given all the distribution deals outside.in is working on, it will probably show up in a lot of other places on the web that are about the place you blog about.
The tools for monitoring and producing localized feeds still seems young and far behind geotagging photos. And unfortunately keyword tagging (like “cambridge”) is a poor substitute (although a zipcode tag is better than nothing). What needs to come first - better tools for bloggers to create geotagged posts or apps that demonstrate the reason to do so?