“Geocoding” is adding latitude/longitude data to something to indicate its physical location — for example, geocoding a digital photograph so you can pinpoint where it was taken, or geocoding your blog so that people can know where you’re blogging from. Now, as far as blogs are concerned, the most frequent use of geocoding is to be able to show which other bloggers are located nearby. A few blog maps showed where some bloggers were relative to one another, but the biggest geocoding project was probably GeoURL: it generated lists of nearby bloggers based on latitude/longitude data embedded in a web page’s metadata. (It was one of Joshua Schachter’s many projects; another one turned into del.icio.us).

Some time last year, though, for whatever reason, GeoURL went dark. Now, under the tutelage of Ask Bjørn Hansen, it’s been relaunched as a version 2.0 beta. There’s a blog for updates. There’s also a Firefox extension. Via Urban Geography.

But GeoURL isn’t the only game in town. There’s also BlogMap, which works with RSS feeds and displays a map of your location using MapPoint. It’s a project of Microsoft employee Chandu Thota, who works on MapPoint, and it’s pretty neat — especially when you click on the number of nearby blogs and get presented with a map of all of them. Via Scobelizer.