Another blog post that just writes itself. Matt of VlogMap emails:
I just wanted to let you know that I just launched VlogMap 2.0… The launch was pushed up 1 month due to being printed this month’s issue of Wired Magazine. The main reason I’m emailing is to inform you of a new feature…
Not only can vloggers map their video blog sites, but they can now map their individual video posts as well. I’m calling this “geovlogging” and it allows visitors to virtually travel to a location and watch videos from the exact location they were filmed…
For example, lets say I’m headed to Tunisia this summer. I can browse the map to see a community member (Andy Carvin) has mapped a bunch of videos from his trip…
And of course, the data is also available in Google Earth…
That’s great news for vloggers, and also for Google Earth users. We now have a network link for individual vlog “entries”, above, as well as a network link that anchors entire video blogs to the authors’ home bases. The disaggregation of georeferenced content into ever-more precisely positioned components continues apace.
At first blush, it might appear strange that tools for georeferencing photos and videos have gone mainstream a lot faster than tools to help text bloggers (wow, sounds so ancient:-) georefence their posts, but perhaps the reason is that photos and video snippets are clearly of a place, whereas text has a nasty habit of wandering all over the place. Text is often abstract, while photos and videos often aren’t; the “where” attribute is more front-and-center for a photograph or video than for a piece of writing.
I think you’re right that images generally are a more natural thing to geotag, since you can indeed see the place that’s being included in the video or photo. Having said that, as I’ve started geotagging my videos, I’ve noticed that around 20% of my videos defy location, in the sense that there’s nothing about them that connotes as specific place. (And now that I’m starting to experiment with editing videos from Second Life, I’m trying to figure out how on earth you’d geotag that.) :-)
Nonetheless, I’d be very tempted to use a similar site to geotag my text blog entries. I’ve done travel blogging for years, so it would be cool to be able to geotag all of that content. Perhaps there’s something to be said about having all of this stuff get mapped on one tool (like google earth) rather than balkanizing text, video, podcasts and the like to separate sites simply because they’re different media formats.