Kyle was at the Post blogger summit last night, too, but he came away with some different impressions:

All the tech geeks in the room started tearing The Post's new feature apart (even though it's still in development and not online yet!) because it didn't have things like geocoding.

... Does anyone give a shit about geocoding? I certainly don't. Do I need to know what blogs about U Street are actually written in apartments on U Street? Seems like a tool for stalkers more than anything else.

Ah, but you should give a shit about it, Kyle, because it's great. Or at least it has the potential to be.

The point of assigning a precise latitude and longitude to a blog isn't to provide useless data like how far from U Street someone lives. It's to provide an objective, universal way of determining location.

Yes, the Post will split up its list of blogs by neighborhood. That'll be useful enough within the Post site. But what about when you want another system to talk to it? Does System X use the same boundaries for Shaw as the Post does? Do they call the area near the Verizon Center Chinatown or Gallery Place or both? Are any neighborhoods divided into north/south or east/west distinctions, and are those divisions the same across the platforms? Do either of them recognize Midcity as a real area?

Latitude and longitude are a language that every system can speak. Without them, you have to write code to account for the differences between each system — code that will break as soon as someone decides to make a minor change to their categorization system.

Hopefully you're convinced that geocoding is important for system interoperability. But why is interoperability important? Well, because the coming location-aware future is going to be really, really cool. Imagine that there's a fire in Columbia Heights, and bloggers located near it are instantly emailed and asked for any impressions they might have. Or think about Zillow providing links to blogs in a property's neighborhood. Or a geocoded story on washingtonpost.com featuring links to writers in the neighborhood. Or a survey of bloggers across the city asking how well a particular city service is delivered in their neighborhood. You might be able to accomplish some of these tasks with a combination of Google and patience, but geocoding would make them all simpler, faster and more reliable.

In short, geocoding is something that non-geeks don't have to worry about, but shouldn't belittle or fight. It's going to allow my fellow dorks to deliver a lot of fairly amazing applications. Geocoded information may not be interesting to humans in its raw form — I think we're all pretty sick of Google Maps mashups by now — but the things that computers can do with it are downright fascinating.