Poll: Do you or would you consider using geotagging on your Web pages?

I first heard of geotagging a few years ago. I'm really into geocaching and using my GPS to play various games, so geotagging Web pages and blog posts seemed to be an obvious extension of that. But I never started doing it on my sites for a couple of reasons:

I couldn't see the point. I mean, I never leave my house (okay, I do, but not often to write posts) and my blog posts and articles don't have any type of geographic component, usually so why should I post the GPS coordinates of where I wrote them?

Privacy. I'm willing to tell you that I live in Snohomish, Washington, because that's a really big place. The likelihood of some nutcase finding me in that entire area is low enough that I don't feel a privacy issue in sharing that. But if I were to give out GPS coordinates of my home, if he had a GPS, the likelihood of that same nutcase coming knocking on my door is a lot higher.

The topics I write about aren't related to travel. So being tagged as written a specific location doesn't have much value.

No one uess it. Those few blogs that display their GPS coordinates are few and far between, and most people don't have any tools to determine their geotag anyway, so doing it on my blogs would just be pretentious and silly.

But lately I've been rethinking these attitudes. geotagging is an interesting and fun use of the more and more ubiquitous location devices that people are carrying around with them daily - cellphones. Even before the iPhone 3G came out with the GPS built-in, most cellphones had ways to triangulate your position based on cell towers. And with geotagging, this can have some interesting uses. Let's look at the obvious ones first:

Free stuff The most common demonstration of geotagging is where you're walking through a mall, and you pass a store that you shop in. The store pings your phone with a coupon or other free offer - valid only in the next 15 minutes and only for you. Sure, it would have to be opt-in, phone spam from "joes pancake and horse hockey parlor" might not be of interest to you, no matter how many times you walk by. But assuming the offers are for things you would want, or buy anyway, this could be a great way to save some money.

Fans But there's more to geotagging than annoying people on cellphones. Perhaps you write a fan blog about Joe's parlor and you always geotag it with your city. If Joe is looking to expand, he could look at the reviews of his parlor, and if there are a bunch geo-tagged in your city, you might get a horse hockey parlor closer to home.

If you geotag every book review you do, then when Orson Scott Card starts his "Ender's Game" movie tour, he might come to your city because there are so many OSC fans geotagging pages there.

But what about privacy? Here's where it gets interesting. As a geotagger, you can choose several ways to protect your privacy, including:

• Don't worry about it. Maybe you want your fans to know exactly where you are at any given moment.
• Provide only generic information. Unless you live in a city of 100 people, chances are you can hide while giving a general location.
• Provide only globalized information, such as your state, province, or country.
• Don't use geotags at all (but if you're going to do that, why did you read this far? [smile])

Geotagging is still in it's infancy. There is a lot more to do including getting better support for blogs, more consistent tags, and getting tools like Brightkite and FireEagle out of beta. But this is an exciting new use for technology on Web pages, and it's fun to be in on things from near the beginning.