Localization through the use of meta data defining from where the blog or individual post is being written, or, if more to the point, a locale that is the subject of a blog post, makes a lot of sense. Even when blogging for business purposes, there is a personal aspect to blogging, and 'tis always good to know who your neighbors are.

This may be even more important for mobile and wireless blogging (moblogs). Whether a modern day wiki(Tocqueville,Alexis de Tocqueville) chronicling political opinions along with your travels, or a realtor blogging about a new listing, being able to tag your posts with pertinent location information is very valuable.

Several services have been created to ease the blogger's task in adding localization. Some use GeoCode tags taken from RFID that can be added to any post, and some use meta tags that must be in the Head information of a web page. Generally, I prefer the ones based on GeoCodes. First, it's easier to have multiple blogs that share the same theme, skin or wiki(blogware) to have different localization tags. Second, these allow individual posts to be tagged with different locations. Both types of tags can work with longitude and latitude, or with other types of location data such as City and Country. Some services can help you find the longitude and latitude for a street address.

We first added a Blogmap to our "About" section of our blogs several weeks ago. You can see that the TeleInterActive Lifestyle, Yackity Blog Blog and Cynosural Blog come from three different, though close locales. It works fairly well, but sometimes slows the load time for our blogs to an unacceptable level.

Another service is Blogmapper, run by the mapbureau which offers a way to add full maps to blogs. They show some very cool examples on their site.

Here's examples of the embedded tags:

xmlns:geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#">
geo:lat> 37.56295 /geo:lat>
geo:long> -122.50167 /geo:long>
http://www.mapbureau.com/blogmapper/v1.php?content=&ctype=&basemap=http://www.mapbureau.com/basemaps/uswlctrail.1.xml


Here's examples of the meta tags:

meta name="ICBM" content="XXX.XXXXX, XXX.XXXXX">
meta name="DC.title" content="THE NAME OF YOUR SITE">

and

META NAME="geo.position" CONTENT="latitude; longitude">
META NAME="geo.placename" CONTENT="Place Name">
META NAME="geo.region" CONTENT="Country Subdivision Code">


Other localization services that use meta tags are as follows.

• GeoURL
• GeoTags
• Getty Foundation uses another type of tags, using a different set of Meta data based on their own ID system, as shown in the final example.


meta name="tgn.id" content="ID#" />
ID: 2012778
Record Type: administrative
Hierarchy of Montara (inhabited place) Montara (inhabited place)
Coordinates:
Lat: 37 32 00 N degrees minutes Lat: 37.5333 decimal degrees
Long: 122 30 00 W degrees minutes Long: -122.5000 decimal degrees
ID: 2012832
Record Type: administrative
Hierarchy of Moss Beach (inhabited place) Moss Beach (inhabited place)
Coordinates:
Lat: 37 31 00 N degrees minutes Lat: 37.5167 decimal degrees
Long: 122 30 00 W degrees minutes Long: -122.5000 decimal degrees
ID: 2013175
Record Type: administrative
Hierarchy of Pacifica (inhabited place) Pacifica (inhabited place)
Coordinates:
Lat: 37 36 00 N degrees minutes Lat: 37.6000 decimal degrees
Long: 122 29 00 W degrees minutes Long: -122.4833 decimal degrees


Brought to you LIVE [OK, after a long time lag, well, actually recorded] from the moon of Titan orbiting Saturn in the Sol System...

ALIEN WINDS

Chilling. An amazing experience.

I didn't work on Huygens, but I did the process analyses (FMECA, FTA, CCA), and led systems engineering and/or risk management for the EUVE, MDI and Gravity Probe-B projects, among other space science experiments and various launch vehicles. So, Huygens' success gets my heart pumping. And chills - did I mention chills?

You can follow Cassini-Huygens progress from Space.com RSS feed or from the ESA.