I've always been a fan of geotagging things, particularly things with a strong connection to the physical world. If enough things are geotagged, particularly news-like things, there would be great potential to find information relevant to you physically. So, for my own experimentation, I put together the Blosxom Geotagger.
This plugin lets you easily geotag - that is, associate something with a specific geographic (latitude/longitude) coordinate - a post on your weblog using plain-text entry. It uses the wonderful free service, Geocoder.us, to do the lookup.
You simply add a header to any Blosxom post (using the meta plugin) called location. e.g.:
My Story on Rochester
meta-location: Rochester, NY
Rochester is a fine city! It is full of people and things. It is,
however, fairly far from Rochester, MN even though a textual search
will come up with both places.
The plugin then queries geocoder.us to turn "Rochester, NY" into a set of latitude-longitude coordinates. (this plugin used to use Google maps, but it was broken). It makes them available in the $geotagger::longitude and $geotagger::latitude variables which you can use in your story flavours. You can, for example, put a link to a map in each geotagged post that shows where, physically, you're talking about.
Of course, it doesn't just do city names - you can put a full street address in. Now, at least for me, the first thing that came to mind when I was entering addresses is "boy, I sure don't want to have to re-enter that address for each post about PLACE_I_HANG_OUT". So you can assign names to locations and re-use them in subsequent posts:
Make your first post about a location, assigning the location to an alias:
meta-location: Home = 123 Example Ln., Rochester, NY
And then in following posts you can use the alias:
meta-location: home
The plugin makes the location alias, if you set it, available through the $geotagger::title variable. Due to the caching, if you want that variable formatted in a certain way, make sure that you format it (case, etc.) the way you want when you assign the alias.
The plugin normalizes location entries (making "Home" and "home"; "Rochester, NY" and "rochester ny" equivalent) and caches the results to minimize the number of geotagger lookups.
The plugin is released under the GPL and is free for you to download, use, hack, whatever - under the terms of the license. Enjoy!
Contact me if there are any issues with the plugin.