We all have our computer time-wasters. For some it's games, for others, IM'ing with friends. For me, it's the geo-web. Just as I used to while away the hours with my beloved Rand McNally atlas as a kid, studying the roads and mountain ranges and imagining what it would be like when I got there some day, now I do it with Google Earth. These days I don't have to be as imaginative -- it's all right there on my desktop. Not only can I see the mountain ranges, I can preview the slopes I'll ski on my next vacation in the Alps (if the dollar ever stops being a toy currency). I can search for news stories that happened within a 5 mile radius of the hotel I'm booking, be it in Cleveland, Corsica, or Cape Town.

Web content management vendors Ektron and Escenic, as well as Australian enterprise search vendor Funnelback, are among the few content technology vendors that integrate geo-web map applications with their own. They're often spun under the rubric of "Web 2.0," given that's the moniker put on anything that might also be described as "cool" or "interactive," and vendors of course want to come off as both. Escenic has found a niche supporting news organizations, allowing users to search for news geographically. On the web, Flickr allows you to search for photos that are tagged geographically, simply by clicking on a map. As is often the case, these mashups are heavily reliant on good metadata, or a geographic taxonomy. In other cases, text mining technology will sift through your managed content, look for location-based clues ("London," "Eiffel Tower" or "SFO"), and then assign GPS coordinates to that content as associated metadata, which is in turn fed into the mapping application.

Like many tools that vendors pass off as completely their own, many of the geo-mapping mashups you might see in WCM or enterprise search demos use OEM'd products. Sniffing backwards along that path, I recently chatted at length with the folks at MetaCarta, whose raison d'être is integrating content and maps, delivering what they call "geographic value" to unstructured content. MetaCarta combines text and geographic searches, then plots the results on a map. Smartly, MetaCarta is "map agnostic" -- meaning they'll use Google's, Microsoft's, or anyone else's mapping system to show the results. Note how it works on the Reuters news site; news is automatically plotted on the canvas of Microsoft Virtual Earth.

As a result of such software, a whole new layer of geo-specific data is added to our content. Standards are emerging to support this geographic tagging, including Google's Keyhole Markup Language, or KML and the Open Geospatial Consortium's GML. If your car or your cell phone has GPS technology, you are creating content just by moving around, or going to pick up milk at the corner store. An interesting new company called Socialight has set up a geographic-based social network letting mobile phone users attach "sticky notes" to locations, so that the next person who drops by can "pick it up." A brave new world of geo-data is emerging, and you will have to manage it.

While this is surely a growing piece of the 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle that is Enterprise Content Management, there's not necessarily a practical business application for the geo-web in your enterprise. Don't be too quick to be dazzled by the demo; after all, do you really need your CMS to tell you where the local pizza joints are? MetaCarta claims that 74% of documents on the Internet are "geo-relevant," or plottable on a map. Is the same true of the content in your enterprise? Will plotting your documents geographically add value to the experience, or enable you to manage or find content more effectively? Perhaps, but as with any software that may look cool on the surface, be sure to assess your real business needs before you invest.