Aza Raskin is set to announce today a new Mozilla Labs project called Geode which is a geotagging effort. Identifying content by location isn’t new for the web, IP addresses generally speaking can be used for geotargetting purposes but geotagging on the client side browser is something that has been a bit more, nebulous (outside of say Flickr or Picassa).
The Geode effort will be by my count the second major effort from Raskin’s team at Mozilla Labs this year. In August, Raskin launched the Ubiquity effort which is a semantic mashup for content.
Raskin himself has only been with Mozilla since January of this year when his firm Humanized was acquired by Mozilla. Aza Raskin, is perhaps best known for being the son of legendary Apple Macintosh UI designer Jef Raskin. Jef Raskin passed away in February of 2005 and was widely credited with being the father of the Apple Macintosh.
*UPDATED* The Geode code (and announcement) are now available on the Mozilla Labs site.
According to Mozilla’s post:
Geode provides an early implementation of the W3C Geolocation specification
so that developers can begin experimenting with enabling location-aware
experiences using Firefox 3 today, and users can tell us what they
think of the experience it provides. It includes a single experimental
geolocation service provider so that any computer with WiFi can get
accurate positioning data.
