Somehow it slipped by me, but the winner of Google Programming Contest has been announced.

Daniel’s project adds the ability to search for web pages within a particular geographic locale.

He parses street addresses, discovered on web pages, into latitude/longitude using TIGER and FIPSand attaches that info as meta-data to the documents. Thats brilliant! Google is built on the ideas that people through the normal business of web building create a rich source of metainformation, and this is a continuation of that basic insight/philosophy.
This is the rejoinder to Cory Doctrow’s argument Metacrap, people suck at metadata.
People only suck at metadata if they know they are building it.

In some ways it reminds me of the work we were talking about at MetaEvents, and then Anyday.com/Palm of building tools to parse data about events out of the general data stream. Useful for an event based search engine or a bookmarklet to grab events out of a web page, and add them to your World’s Best Online PIM. CIIR was working on this back in 1998, rabble and I dreamed of getting our hands on it, when we shared an office with them, but it was one of their DARPA projects, so if they got anywhere with it, we’re not likely to hear about it. :(