Map Spam Coming

Last week, Flickr announced GeoTags, highlighting the increasing importance of the “place” dimension in the largely “virtual” Internet.

“When we were doing our projections for how many photos Flickr members would geotag, we though that we’d hit Spiral Jetty a million in the first month, maybe even as fast as two weeks. Instead, 24 hours in, there were 1,234,384 geotagged photos (and now more than 1.6 million geotagged photos as I write this, about 9 hours later). Crazy!”

9 days later, Map Spam?

Do a search on San Francisco at Flickr Map. 30,993 results. Presumably, where Yahoo wants to go with this, is to be able to cross-pollinate Yahoo! Travel with Flickr photos. San Francisco, today, has 100 User Photos. I’ll check back in 90 days, after the viral effect of GeoTagging has taken hold in the Yahoo community.

My prediction: All this Place-Smart information on the web will soon require smarter organization frameworks and object models. Stay tuned. There are companies working on cracking this code in stealth mode. GeoTag isn’t enough to organize photographs by place. And photographs are not the only type of content that need to be organized by place.

More discussion: here, here, here, here.