We just added support for Yahoo! Placemaker's geo-recognition service to Managing News. This is an optional replacement for the default place-term lookup feature and can be enabled and configured in the administration section of Managing News. For those new to automatic geotagging services, Placemaker is a free API that leverages Yahoo's GeoPlanet location database to identify where in the world a particular piece of content is relevant.
Here is a look at Managing News using Placemaker to tag content in Chinese:
There are a few reasons we wanted to do this. The first is that we've been working on multilingual versions of Managing News and found that the core geotagger is not able to correctly identify word breaks in languages like Chinese and Arabic. The Placemaker API is able to receive and parse content in 21 languages and return place names in the language you request. This flexibility greatly extends the accessibility of Managing News to non-English users.
Second, it's not always easy to find a list of location terms with latitude and longitude for the places for which we want to track news. Will White has a great post about customizing maps on Managing News, but we wanted to make it even easier for end-users to download the software and get going.
To get set up using Placemaker geotagging with Managing News check out the DRUPAL-6--1 branch of the Managing News profile on Drupal.org. The included makefile will let you build all the necessary components from source. This feature will be included in the next release of the project from ManagingNews.com, but we wanted to let folks who couldn't wait access it now.
