So I finally put up some Semapedia tags, and of course they noticed right away! Because I tagged them properly in Flickr. That way they show up at the bottom of the semapedia page, and in the semapedia stream on flickr. Yes, all kind of tasty web 2.0 goodness in there.

Now semapedia has a method for adding geotags to your photos so that they can place it on their World Semapedia Map which uses Google Earth API. Also, you can use the brand-spanking new Flickr Maps thing in the flickr organizer. But that uses Yahoo Maps, and Yahoo Maps kind of suck unless you are in North America. Most semapedia users are not in North America. And if you're not in North America, Yahoo basically doesn't show any roads and the satellite imagery sucks rocks.

So now Guido Sohne the amazing programmer from Ghana (it rhymes if you have the right accent...) (or maybe the hacker from accra?) has put together "semaflickr" ... you can't tell from the name, but it's a web app that works almost 100% identically to the flickr maps, uses the flickr API, but Google Maps for the maps and satellite photos. So, you can use it to precisely geotag semapedia tags in Europe or other places.

The new app is open source and very easy to use. It integrates with your flickr account, and then it just gives you your photo stream at the top, and a map at the bottom. You drag your photo onto the map location where you took it. You can move the little marker around to make it more precise. And it automatically geocodes your photos.

Then, semapedia's server automatically picks it up and adds it to their map.

Guido provides complete source, it's all written in Ruby (wow) and Rails (sounds good) and javascript (ok) and ... well, it's Web 2.0 to the max. The amount of actual source code is minimal. And he's done something clever so that it hardly hits the web at all, even asynchronously. So, I hope that the semapedia folks upgrade their "publish your tags" system to Guido's software, or else point people to his server, or whatever. It's really good.