For all who Planet Switzerland is not local enough, we just added a new feature: Search by city or canton. Some examples

city:ZĂŒrich

city:Bern

city:Sankt Gallen

canton:ZĂŒrich

canton:Bern

canton:Sankt Gallen

and also by country: country:Switzerland

And you can see the geo information for each blog, if you click on “More Info on this post”.

Technically, we check the Blog html start-page for or name=”geo.position” and insert that into the DB. After that, we search for the appropriate city with the help of OpenGeoDB, which should have coordinates for all Swiss (and German) cities and save that in the DB as well.

This means, that only blogs show up on “location-search”, who have those meta-tags on their homepage, even if you search for “country:Switzerland”. And all blogs located in foreign countries do not show up either, since we don't have data for those (except Germany, but there's no blog up north with geodata), not even for Peru :). There are currently 167 blogs with geodata and 156 of them were “located”.

Since OpenGeoDB only has one “point” per city, there are cases, where the city is wrong (eg, if you live nearer to the centre of the neighbor-town than to your hometown). If that's the case for your blog, please report this to us and we can fix it (we just add another point to the GeoDB). As mentioned above, you can check the town we assigned to you with “More Info on this post”.

We also currently don't parse the RSS feed for geo location data. That will come later, and then each post can be on a different place.

How to add the meta-data to your blog is written on a blog-post by Alain. And another use of those data can be seen on the SLUG – Blog Map.

And as always, if you have more ideas, what could be done with that, just tell us :)