Geotag the Internet – my rejected 4iP project

Continuing this week’s them of rejection (a bloke could get paranoid), I’ve just heard that my (more in hope than expectation) 4iP project has been knocked back. If you don’t know what 4iP is then a quick look at their website should help, if you don’t care then it doesn’t matter (basically, funding for “public service interwebs”). I wasn’t after the money so much as the promise that they could link you up with other people that would complement your skills —I couldn’t have made my idea on my own.

My thing was very basically a “geo-stumble upon” a way to attache geo-data to the wealth of exsiting web content that doesn’t have it. Easy to use, but mainly building up a huge bak of useful data that people could do cool stuff with. Not local search, but “geo attention“.

Here’s what I submitted, in case you are interested — I think this would be a very good idea, so in lieu of me being involved in making it I’d like to throw it out to anyone who might:

Elevator Pitch

Geo-data is about to be the next big thing on the web, but people who make sites don’t know how and where sites are useful. People are also to busy to tag thier content. A bowser plugin/web service that allowed people to say “this content is useful to me here” or “this site is about here” — and then used this data to place sites on the earth as well as on the web (or at least peoples’ attention to them). Site plus open API allows local search for existing content — creating geo-data for the millions of sites without it.

Needs and Benefits

There are billions of pieces of content on the internet, but very few have any geodata attached to them — some because they aren’t geographically relevant, but many because the will/skills aren’t there to attach that data. One of the most difficult tasks on the web is local search, and even if new content is geotagged the existing net isn’t — this will really become apparent with the “hyperlocal revolution” having huge gaps.

Approach

Technically the idea is to make recording your “geo-attention” of a site as simple as possible — just one button click when signed in (using existing services: fireeagle/skyhook/google latitude etc to record location). Your profile can then be used to recommend sites based on your interests and location, you share your attention data, “friends” share your geo-bookmarks.

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