In a comment on yesterday’s post about making news easy to find and easy to share, Alex reminds me that he and I have had this conversation before. Now that I think about it, we’ve had this conversation a lot, especially about finding relevant news based on location.

And about this time last year you and I worked out a way to do this. Well, the skeleton of one. It can be built, but UI is important, and location’s not going to happen unless Geotagging is made easy, and no one’s going to use it unless everyone else is using it.
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There must be a better way than to get someone to find a zip/postal code or click around a map.
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A fundamental problem:: there’s a lot of content in content silos. And aggregation of the full text is too much often a legal issue than a technical one. Put NYT, WSJ, Times, Guardian, Xinhua, Al Jazeera content into a giant silo and get the parties to agree, include the blogosphere, Wikipedia, geo tag and auto-classify the lot. I believe that would be hard.

Geotagging was always going to be the hardest thing. I know a couple news sites that do it, but it’s rare.

• Everyblock links to stories that have enough geographic information to plot on a map.
• MySanAntonio.com uses MetaCarta to create a local news feed (but good luck finding that on the site).
• Pegasus News remembers your neighborhood (if you’re logged in) and filters news, events and listings accordingly.

We tried doing this with DalianDalian. It works well enough for restaurant and bar listings (when I log in, the map centers on my old address on Xinhua Jie) but we never figured out how to make the process simple enough for other types of content, nor could we automate geotagging for imported blog posts and photos.

Of all the sites I’ve seen, Everyblock has by far the best geotagging system. It’s automated, uses natural language and has the cleanest user interface. The source code is set to be released in June 2009, so it’s possible some of that functionality can be integrated into sites producing news, not just aggregators.

But it doesn’t even need to be that complex. I can live without news filtered by city block. Just city-specific news would go a long way. InsideBayArea.com does this (here’s Fremont) in the most basic way (disclosure: I freelance for this company).

Again, all of this goes back to what I wrote before: When I go to a site, all I want is news, findable and shareable, without having to swim through clutter. And news about somewhere I’m not (on a local news site) becomes clutter very quickly.