The internet lets school children in Mongolia work on science projects with kids from Florida, right? That’s cool and all, but it also let’s you find out what’s playing at the cinema a few blocks away.

The web can be local. In fact, I’m having tea with some virtual/actual neighbours this week. Some of whom I have never met in person.

The GeoURL project longitude and latitude coordinates to websites. Acts of Volition sits happily at 46.26227° North and 63.15676° West. They refer to this location as your “ICBM Address” or “missile address”.

Add a few simple tags to your site, in our case:

<meta name=”ICBM” content=”46.26227,-63.15676″ />
<meta name=”DC.title” content=”Acts of Volition” />

The GeoURL project indexes your site (you can ping them to let them know you want to be indexed), picks up these tags, and adds your site to their database. You can then view a page of neighbours; sites that are geographically nearby. While most of my GeoURL-neighbours are a about 170 Km away in Halifax, I expect to see more of my neighbours in Charlottetown show up in the GeoURL database soon.

This is an elegant little application of what is to come with the semantic web.

Also see Ben Brown’s article, Taking Interactivity Offline.