Update
We spoke to John Hanke and two Google developers about the issue of authorship and attribution. The best way for links back to the proper contexts to happen is for us to make sure we include those links in the kml we emit, which we are going to set up as quickly as possible.
We were also told that they have plans to begin supporting georss in addition to kml, which is great news. Adding user-created data into local search is fantastic and Google seems sincere in its desire to find the right way of crediting authors.
Another great thing that came out of the meeting was a discussion about featuring some of Platial users' best content in Google Earth. We'll tell you more about that as we move ahead.
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The new Google geo-search tool pulling in user-created content is very cool. I was pretty disappointed, though, to notice that they aren't giving the users who created the data links back to their information in context.
So if you search for a restaurant in Irvine, you're sure to find one of Baostar's great reviews, but you'll get no link to his restaurant map. It's like showing a blog post in a list of search results without linking back to the blog. I wonder if this is a temporary oversight or if it's a lack of understanding on the part of Google of what user-created geodata really is. After a year of admiring what our users have been doing, we know that these are not just points on the map. These are rich posts connected to places, whose authors deserve to be respected.
We are in touch with Google to make sure they understand this issue. Authors unite!
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