NBC Local Media will join Fwix, a geolocation technology provider based in San Francisco, as the first media partner to test the company’s new Geotagger button across its online properties in 10 major U.S. markets.
In addition to NBC Local, Fwix said the Rocky Mountain region news site, New West, would also participate in the Geotagger beta program.
Fwix offers a geodata platform that can automatically index Web content by latitude and longitude coordinates, helping website operators better understand their online traffic. Its technology now covers 61,000 cities in seven countries, collecting content from more than 35,000 sources including news, blogs, events, reviews and social media.
Founded in October 2008 by Darian Shirazi, Fwix was originally designed to filter news and information on the Internet by local area. The company’s app will appear on sites the same as content-sharing buttons, such as ShareThis or Twitter, and gives users more information about places mentioned on a given site or Web page.
By clicking, a smartphone user is taken to Fwix.com, which aggregates hyperlocal content from 175 markets in the United States and Canada, or a branded page for a particular publisher that is populated with relevant Fwix content.
“By pasting a line of javascript into a page, we’ll automatically geotag that page, and publishers can then access GeoTags, e.g. the location data of the referenced places, through an API (applications protocol interface),” said the Fwix blog. “On top of this, any page that carries the button will get free distribution across the Fwix Network, which reaches nearly 50 million unique visitors per month.”
In April, Fwix rolled out a new developer platform that allows any publisher to build local and “geo-enabled” applications that can be monetized via its ad network, which includes ads from AT&T Interactive’s YellowPages.
“With the rise of mobile phones as the main way people access the Internet, search is becoming as much about where you are, as it is about what you want,” said Shrazi.
