The best Autoblogs have Google Maps?

I have been noticing many of the top news related "autoblogs" have a Google Map next to the content. My theory is that Google loves content with maps since Google is huge on location based search.

Inserting the google map is easy. My only question is where the heck are the GPS coordinates coming from? Obviously the process is automated as all their content has some GPS coordinate associated with it and "related articles" are posted on the map too.

Here is an example of what I am talking about
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/119/064/An_Open_Letter_to_President_Obama.html

They are not using the source whois address for the geocode. Here is an example of the coordinates matching an article. I am trying to find the relationship

Article:
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/116/674/Cute_Pet_of_the_Day_-_July_28,_2010.html

Lat: 37.906
Lon: -122.545

Address: 59-77 E Blithedale Ave, Mill Valley, CA 94941, USA

Took a look, to see if they were anything related. Seems those locations are just at random because some articles say the state and city before the text and on the map it is located in a different region or even different country than what the article is about.

Looks like its pin the tail on the map & say that's where the article is about.

so what's the verdict? will the map-that-matches-an-article add some google love? interesting tactic btw

foxler said:

Took a look, to see if they were anything related. Seems those locations are just at random because some articles say the state and city before the text and on the map it is located in a different region or even different country than what the article is about.

Looks like its pin the tail on the map & say that's where the article is about.

Click to expand...

I dont think its random. Parts of it maybe. I can tell its not mapped to the author or article source because articles from the same source can have different geocodes. Not all the articles have geocode info. But some of them actually match the article content. Look at this article talking about a Florida and it shows the map for local Florida news.

http://beforeitsnews.com/story/38/076/Another_Republican_Comes_To_HIs_Senses.html

But then again a story about Arizona has a map for India. LOL

That article about Arizona mentions a "Indian Reservation"! They must have a list of cities, states, business names, etc all mapped to geocodes then they do a search for these key phrases on the article text to find a geocode. I am guessing that how India matched to Indian.

I like the idea, its looks cool, and it might help with local search. What you think? Lets make something like this! Who's with me?

http://beforeitsnews.com/story/118/668/AZ_Militia_Kills_Two_Zetas.html

looks they they probably calling some API to get the geocode. I found a cool one provided by yahoo called Placemaker. Its not perfect and actually returns MANY locations per article so you just got to pick one.

http://developer.yahoo.com/geo/placemaker/

You can test it out here too

http://isithackday.com/hacks/placemaker/

Then I found this plugin for wordpress that will use the yahoo api!
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/geo-mark/

Enjoy!