Feedmap has created a little routine that will generate a blogmap – a tiny-badge-sized map that shows your blog’s location. It’s clickable. It’s interactive. You can put this in your metadata column on the front page of your blog so that others know where you are, and you can see how many other local bloggers are in your area. Neat.
Here’s the problem…
Let’s say you’re using your residence as your blogging base of operations. Let’s say you’ve implemented both Feedmap and "Fly to with Google Earth", as has Tim Hibbard from Lawrence, KS. Tim travels a good bit, and has a cool little script that outputs the geotags of his blog in Google Earth KML format. Now, let’s say I’m a tech-savvy cat burgler. I now know exactly where Tim lives and when he is out of town on an extended trip.
Sure, you really don’t need geotagging or APIs to be an enterprising cat burgler. You could just read the posts themselves. I could gather from Tim’s blog whether or not he has a roommate or attack ferret, but an alarm might be a problem. But, hey! He’s in outer Mongolia and won’t be back from another week, so I decide to take my chances. I myself tend to talk about gear, and the cool gadgets I’ve got. I’ve just given the potential burglers a shopping list (although I tend to carry my coolest gear with me.)
For what it’s worth, I think Tim has some cool widgets for his blog, and I’m going to attempt to use his code on this site for an RSS-to-KML link. However, it does drive home one caveat – don’t put too much info about yourself in your blog. For that matter, I’ll never geotag my home address (although it’s easily derived by other means.)
[tags]geotagging, geotag[/tags]