under the fire star

As someone who thought GeoURL was a neat idea, I found this pretty funny -- from Idle Words:

Here's a great illustration of why it's bad to rely on metadata alone.

There's a nice project out there called GeoURL. Bloggers figure out what their coordinates are, and include that information in a META tag in their weblog. This information consists of a latitude/longitude pair.

Students of Murphy's Law will instantly see the potential for mayhem. If you look at a map of the 5000 weblogs with GeoURL data, you'll see there's a curious cluster around the East Horn of Africa. Is this some new phenomenon sweeping the blogosphere? A blog craze in Yemen? Fishermen blogging from the Indian Ocean? Somalis moblogging from Mogadishu?

Nope -- it's hapless Czechs and Germans who got their latitude and longitude transposed. If you don't believe me, look it up!