Machine tags are neat, but it still seems like they aren’t used for much and they’re kind of a lot of work to apply. The good news is that I just stumbled onto two links, each of which addresses one of those points for one of the areas I’m most interested in geotagging.

First, I found the Del.icio.us Geotag Generator Services from BlockRocker. The page has a simple form where you can enter an address (or just a city name) and it generates the geotags you would add to Delicious, or anything which you can tag. It would be great, of course, if it appeared in the same pop-up that comes up from the Del.icio.us tool bar, but in the meantime, it works pretty well. I’ve started tagging some of my old bookmarks, although I’ll probably never go back and do them all. (Then again I might. I have been known to get compulsive about things like that!) It appears that BlockRocker periodically grabs all geotagged Delicious bookmarks and integrates them into its system. Unfortunately, Delicious doesn’t actually understand the tags, so I can’t just take the feed of my geotags and plop it on Google Maps. I looked a little at Yahoo Pipes to see if it could do the necessary magic, but that looks like more work than writing my own code. In any case, not tonight…

Secondly, I see that Revish (yet another social book site) is supporting Book tags for Flickr photos. That’s fine, but I don’t have anything to tag that way on Flickr! I’ve been occasionally putting booktags on Delicious links. Since Delicious doesn’t support wildcard matches for tags, I’m suggesting that people start using “booktagged” in the same sense in which “geotagged” is used now to identify Delicious links which also have true machine tags that could be used.

(2007-08-02: Edited to update BlockRocker tag generator link, since they moved it.)