Most newspaper only provide snippets of news articles in their RSS feeds. Therefore The Guardian newspaper received a lot of positive press last week for their decision to include complete news stories in their RSS feeds. What was not remarked on so much was their decision to also start geolocating articles.
Paul Carvill explains how The Guardian implements geolocation data in their on-line news articles and how that data can be used by readers in an article called guardian.co.uk gets maps.
The Guardian themselves have created a Google Maps mash-up of their coverage of the US Presedential Election called Deadline USA. The Guardian's reporters add latitude and longitude data when they file a story. The story then shows up on the Deadline USA map with the reporter's location marked.
Anyone can use The Guardian's RSS feeds to create Google Maps mash-ups of the paper's news stories. I expect The Gurdian will also be producing a lot more of their own Google Maps mash-ups.
Newsdurhamregion.com
Of course news doesn't have to be international to warrant geolocation, most people are just as interested in the news stories on their own doorsteps. Newsdurhamregion.com geo-codes the stories from local newspapers in Oshawa, Ontario, east Toronto and presents them on a Google Map.
The map animates through the most recent stories. If you spot a headline that grabs your attention you can stop the animation and click on the link to take you through to the main article. The main articles also include smaller Google Maps to show the location of the story.
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