In March Google announced that they would support GEORSS for Google Maps. This is big news for the hospitality industry, and slowly we start to see some interesting implementations of this. When Guillaume Thevenot's posted the "Unofficial Travel / Hospitality Blogs ranking - June 07..." Albert Barra responded with his post: "Blogs de Turismo en Espaņol" to encourage Spanish bloggers to be put on the map as well, literally. Albert provided simple and clear instructions via his blog and their Google group "Turismo 2.0". The result: a map of all the blogs en Espaņol can be found here.

After reading Albert's initial post I realized that many probably do not know that you can GEOcode RSS files, let alone mash them on Google Maps. For that reason I decided to reach out in true collaborative web2.0 spirit to illustrate the ever-increasing power of RSS in our second generation web environment.

Please note that my intensions were not to replicate Albert's work but rather to illustrate the use of GEORSS. It should in fact be noted that I would not have been able to create this without Albert's work. So before I continue I want to thank him and the Turismo 2.0 group members for their efforts.

Below you will find four RSS files that are GEO coded so they can be mashed with Google Maps.

hospitalityblogs_ALL.xml (all languages)

hospitalityblogs_ES.xml (Espaņol)

hospitalityblogs_EN.xml (English)

hospitalityblogs_FR.xml (Franįais)

Use these feeds as you like. You could add them to your favorite RSS reader, or even use them to import their content to your own blog. Note that the "all languages feed" is categorized so you can filter by language (with IE 7, for example). These feeds do not contain news from the blogs. For this, combined news feeds from blogs, you should check "Travel in Blogs"

Now the interesting part

The interesting part is when you mash these GEORSS feeds with Google Maps. To do this, simply copy the URL into the search box of Google maps. Or just click here to see this using the hospitality blogs in English RSS feed.

It gets even more interesting when you use the Google Maps API. Click here to see the mashup I created with the GEORSS feeds. Please note that you are more than welcome to use this map on your own blog just like I did on my blog . To do this you simply have to create a new blog entry, and insert an "iframe". (Contact me if I can help)

Here is the code:

<iframe src="http://rshotels.com/demo/GEORSS/HBgeoRSSOverlay600.html" scrolling="auto" name="GEORSS MAP of Hospitality Blogs" width="600" height="580" style="width: 600px; height: 580px"></iframe>

Note: I have created this page with 600 and 500 px width. So depending what fits better you can change the highlighted 6's to 5's.

I will attempt to add more blogs in the future, but I hope this has illustrated the power of RSS and why it plays a big role in the second generation web.

Questions, comments? Please contact me.

PS. Many of the blogs have or will be added to the custom Hotel Industry Search engine!