ICBM RSS Module

Here's a quick RFC. 

Note:

This RSS module is an implimentation of an idea that was completely Kenneth Hunt's.  It would not exist if it were not for him.

Kenneth Hunt and I have been exploring some geographical stuff as they relate to weblogs, news, technology, and all of that jazz.  This RSS module addresses how to geolocate your RSS feed or individual items.

I've been exploring the GeoURL meta tags and decided to take it to the next level.  Here is an RSS module that should integrate easily into RSS 2.0 and probably will work in RSS 1.0.  I've taken its structure from Dave Winer's creativeCommons module.

We have two elements which can be applied either to the <channel> or <item> elements.  If applied to the <channel> element, it is assumed that the entire feed can be assumed to be about or originating from that specific location.  If applied to the individual <item> (the cool way to do it), the specific item can be considered originating from or about that geolocation.

Here are the two elements covered in the icbm module:

<icbm:latitude>39.02980</icbm:latitude>
<icbm:longitude>-77.07929</icbm:longitude>

The namespace for this module is the URL that you are reading right now: http://postneo.com/icbm.  An example RSS 2.0 feed making use of the icbm module is here.  And I checked, it validates.

Implementations (Added 4/13/03)

I have currently implemented this module with MovableType and Blosxom.  Please refer to my posts about the Blosxom implementation and the MovableType implementation.  More will come.

Implementing this with templates has been fairly trivial in some blogging packages, but I haven't done them all.  I'm also not quite sure how to take advante of this, but I'm sure it could be used in news aggregators and rss search services and a bajillion other things.

Other Modules (added 5/23/03)

Thanks to an alert wiki user who pointed out an RDF-based way of doing this.  More information can be found at the WGS 84 Geo page.

Thoughts

I'm curious about what people might have to say about this module.  As of this instant, I would consider it usable but subject to change.  Feel free to discuss this amongst yourselves, send me an email  or move your discussions over to the icbm module wiki page.