Making the web a bit more semantic, the GeoURL ICBM Address Server is a fine concept for mapping web sites to – you guess it – locations. So you can attach your home page to the place where you live or whichever place you think might be most relevant. In order to add your server to the database, you have to add some meta elements (vernac. „tags“) to your HTML.

There are two styles to choose from. First there is GeoURL‘s own ICBM meta tag or you could use the geo.position element of the GeoTags family of meta keywords alternatively. The latter is a bit more descriptive as it allows for additional field. It is equally supported by GeoURL, but the ICBM entry is sort of cool as it dates back to the good old days of Usenet.

it‘s a bit tricky to get you own location if you don‘t have a GPS receiver. There is list of helpful resources at GeoURL to find your location. While there are a lot of web sites covering North America, there is much less to find supporting Europe. I found WehereOnEarth to be sufficient for my needs.

So in the end I enriched this weblog with spatial information by adding the following fields to the HTML header:

<meta name="icbm" content="52.52207, 13.38274">
<meta name="geo.position" content="52.52207;13.38274">
<meta name="geo.placename" content="Berlin, Berlin, Germany, Europe">
<meta name="geo.region" content="DE-BE">

Once you have done that, you can „ping“ your site to GeoURL. The GeoURL server reads the latitude/longitude information from either element and stores it in its database. You can then look up other sites that have specified locations in your area. Here is my neighbourhood. Seems as if I got the most central blog site in Berlin.

Even cooler, this list can be returned in RSS (and other useful formats) so you can track changes to the list of your „neighbour sites“ using your RSS reader.