Location based services are a big thing right now. With everybody and their grandmother having GPS enabled handsets and services that find your location from your IP number or the wireless hotspot you use, the web becomes much more personal and immediate than it was ever before.

The issue is that there isn't a lot of content out on the web and new one being created that has quality geographical data in it. This makes it hard to match your location with relevant interesting pieces of information.

Yahoo Placemaker is a new service that fills this gap. You can feed it a text, a data feed or a web site URL and it returns the geographically relevant information in this text with hierarchical information, Latitude and Longitude and tells you where in the text it found this information.

In this session Christian Heilmann will explain Placemaker, show some implementations built with it and gives you step-by-step information on how you can use it using PHP or JavaScript.