The process of geolocating information isn't new to journalists; producing maps has long been a key part of what we do. But when it comes to our stories, extracting mappable entities like cities from text is a relatively new concept.

There are commercial services that do this task, and researchers have created software for academic pursuits as well. Widespread free availability of geolocation services, however, has been mostly wishful thinking until last month.

That's when Yahoo! announced Placemaker, an API for extracting geographic locations from text. It's important to note that Placemaker isn't a geocoder; it doesn't parse addresses and return coordinates. The announcement describes it as "a geo-enrichment service that assists in determining the whereness of unstructured content and helps make the Internet increasingly hyper local."

What that means in practice is that you could write a script that passes a block of text (say, an article) to Placemaker. The service identifies any locations in that text and returns an XML response with geographic details based on Yahoo!'s GeoPlanet service.

So news organizations could process articles or entire sections of archives through Placemaker to organize them by location rather than just topic, byline or date, for example. There are no current rate limits on the API, which means that processing thousands of stories is possible without breaking the collection into smaller chunks.