Today I attended the Grow Your Business social media program at Madison College. Steve Noll facilitated a fun conversation on the impact of social media. He touched on the subject of Geotagging. According to Wikipedia, Geotagging (also written as GeoTagging) is the process of adding geographical identification metadata to various media such as photographs, video, websites, SMS messages, or RSS feeds and is a form of geospatial metadata. These data usually consist of latitude and longitude coordinates, though they can also include altitude, bearing, distance, accuracy data, and place names. It is commonly used for photographs, giving geotagged photographs.

Geotagging can help users find a wide variety of location-specific information. For instance, one can find images taken near a given location by entering latitude and longitude coordinates into a suitable image search engine. Geotagging-enabled information services can also potentially be used to find location-based news, websites, or other resources. Geotagging can tell users the location of the content of a given picture or other media or the point of view, and conversely on some media platforms show media relevant to a given location.

The related term geocoding refers to the process of taking non-coordinate based geographical identifiers, such as a street address, and finding associated geographic coordinates (or vice versa for reverse geocoding). Such techniques can be used together with geotagging to provide alternative search techniques.

Steve also touched on the importance of security and the risk of posting your location for “your friends” to see. According to Steve, Foursquare has about 10 million users and has created a great social media interface for retailers interested in rewarding people who “check in” frequently.

I attended this session for several reasons. I hadn’t seen the new Madison College West Campus yet, I wanted to get some fresh ideas on Social Media and it included free lunch. What a deal. A perfect networking event.

Watch for more great programs and innovative learning programs from Madison College. If we continue to promote continuing education and innovative learning with real business applications, our economy in Dane County will stay strong into the future.

Thanks to everyone at Madison College who put today’s program on, including the Fitchburg, Verona and Middleton Chamber’s of Commerce. If you want more information on Madison College click http://matcmadison.edu/CCL.