Yahoo! just quietly brought online a nifty tool called “TagMaps.”:http://developer.yahoo.com/yrb/tagmaps/ As the name suggest, it is a new way of visualizing tags by overlaying them on maps. You need 3 components for this to work, objects, tags, and geo-location. Their first example is to use Flickr images, which conveniently has all 3 components.

Example below is using the “World Explorer”:http://tagmaps.research.yahoo.com/worldexplorer.php mode and entering “bangkok”:http://tagmaps.research.yahoo.com/worldexplorer.php?lat=13.7299635562192&lon=100.499925613403&zoom=5 for location. (2 other modes are “night explorer”:http://tagmaps.research.yahoo.com/nightexplorer.php which filter only pictures taken at night, and “trip explorer”:http://tagmaps.research.yahoo.com/tripexplorer.php which take data from “Yahoo! Travel Trip Planner”:http://travel.yahoo.com/trip )

TagMaps aggregate objects (in this case, pictures) that has the same tags in the same geographic area, and display the tags on the maps. Tags with more items appear in larger type size, and location of the tag text is the mid point calculated from all objects with that tag) It is very smart.

And it can be embedded! Thumbs Up, Yahoo!

For more of what you can do with this (especially, using the engine to display your own set of geo-tagged objects or through custom RSS) see the “Yahoo! developer network for TagMaps.”:http://developer.yahoo.com/yrb/tagmaps/