Thanks for the feedback. I do like the icon and the motivation for it – sorry to emphasize it more till the end. I figure the community will pick up what is most useful and having options always helps produce the best result. The geotag icon is a good option and I’m sure folks will pick it up. I do think it is useful for some guidance on how it works with existing icons, but that is more a nit than anything.

On the semantic side I don’t disagree that annotations are and can be useful. More to the point, the vast majority of usage tends to be trivial (pictures of my vacation and favorite bars etc.). It gets eyeballs and that drives many things. I think the real potential going forward is combining structured geospatial data (i.e. databases) with unstructured annotations. For instance – if in addition to having the lat long of people that are sick you had a structured dataset of demographics or disease mortality rates to overlay them on you could answer some very interesting questions. If you had an automated way to answer the question is there a correlation between a certain ethnicity or disease mortality rate you could really make some potential progress. That in my opinion is where the power of the semantic web lies. While there is power in annotations I hope to see more combinations with new datasets rather than more mashups of existing annotations. Just one perspective and opinion though.

As regards the semantic web, I think what we were trying say is that people will see the icon, discover geotagging, and do it themselves—thus increasing the breadth and depth of data available. If people don’t share data there can be no semantic web. But Sir Tim Berners-Lee agrees with you (or you with him!) that much of the potential data resources are locked away in databases. Maybe encouraging individual users to geotag helps create a demand, and the corporate database owners will follow and release their geotagged data too? Small users started using feeds and now big players are using them eagerly, so it’s not beyond the realms of possibility.

As for answering trivial questions, I don’t think this is a given. We are territorial animals and much of what goes on in the world has geographic ramifications. As an example, see WhoIsSick which uses geo-location in combination with other user-contributed data to model the spread of disease in a way that has significant implications for Internet-mediated public health surveillance. A simple set of coordinates has a lot of utility when combined with other simple data: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

An interesting read, thanks, and I was relieved to read “quite nice” and “useful” at the end!

P.S. The “giant” pushpin and globe in the Geotag Icon are not to scale