Let’s hope that the video of me playing with a lite saber doesn’t pop up when someone clicks on the location of the Sharper Image store in San Diego. That, of course, is not why the news that Google is going to integrating geo-tagged YouTube videos with Google Earth is burning up the internets

Erick Schonfield nails it when he writes that “Projects like this point to a day when the entire world will be tagged by its citizens”. This immediately brought to mind some of Jon Udell’s thoughts on tagging (and here). The challenge has always been user participation in this universal tagspace, and a lack of standards. If we have a universal tagspace, we have a built in layer on top of the web which allows digital objects (pictures, documents, video, etc) to form this rich interconnected web. Till now only a small minority of users tagging digital objects, so we are a long way from achieving these goals

Another very interesting thoughts on the implications comes from John Battelle

Second Life is all about play, and fantasy, and alternative realities. I’m going to guess that Google’s version is going to be all about reality, and mashing up AdWords, Google Earth, Sketchup, and the Yellow Pages/Google Local.

Technorati Tags: YouTube, Google Earth, Tagging