Localfeeds

• Sun, 07 Dec 2003 at 07:30:37 GMT
• 0 Comments
• References

I just discovered Localfeeds, a search engine for feeds where the searches are based on geographic location. This seemed interesting enough, so I typed in my ZIP (10001) and was shown the most recent blogs within 50 miles of 10001 (New York City). Sure enough, there are a lot of people talking about the big snow storm we're having here. Neat.

The current trend seems to be that people interested in a particular topic tend to read the same blogs. While this can be good in that you explore the perspectives related to a particular topic from people all around the world, it is pretty fun to see what random people who live near you are talking about. I would never think of writing about the current snow storm, for example, because most people who read my blog are interested in PHP or Web development, but it was cool to read blogs of people who did just that.

Not wanting to be left out, I went back to the first page to see how to get added to such a thing. Is your site ready for Localfeeds? I typed in http://shiflett.org/ to find out. I was shown the checklist for shiflett.org, which was much different than what you will see now. I did not properly indicate the coordinates for where I live, which I learned must be expressed in a meta tag:

<meta name="ICBM" content="40.750422,-73.996328" />

After adding this and returning to the checklist, I found everything to be in order, and I was told to click a link to notify Localfeeds and GeoURL. I then visited GeoURL, out of curiosity, and I saw my site listed:

Chris Shiflett: Home (near New York, USA. see neighbors)

Very cool. Of course, I feel like the last to know about this stuff, but maybe this will introduce it to someone new.