Steven Berlin Johnson on the geographic web
The idea of requiring geographic metadata for information might strike some people as excessive, but I suspect in a few years we will look back at the first decade of the web and be amazed that we went for so long without it. …
We are also increasingly standardizing metadata for time. One of the things that is not commonly said about the blogging revolution is that it has introduced machine-readable time stamps for billions of web pages. One of the things that made Blogger such a breakthrough product was not that it made it easy to put up a web page and publish your thoughts – home page building tools had been doing that for years – but rather the fact that it let you publish a reverse chronological list of your thoughts.
So we have widely adopted metadata for virtual location and for time. We just haven’t made the same breakthrough for real-world location.