About six months ago the popular GeoURL site began returning a page that stated simply, "We are down for renovations. Check back soon!" I don't know how extensive the renovations they were planning are supposed to be, but GeoURL has never returned.

For those who don't know, GeoURL was a very popular service that enabled a website owner to add just two lines of code to their header which contained their GPS coordinates, and GeoURL would map those documents to real-world locations. Once you had added your site to GeoURL's database, you could then immediately see who else had registered Web pages in (or near) your neighborhood. This was a great service for weblog communities in particular. The two lines were in the format:

• <meta name="geo.position" content="xx.xxxx; yy.yyyy" />
• <meta name="DC.title" content="your site name here" />

This was also known as an ICBM Address for some of the earlier users (like me):

• <meta name="ICBM" content=" xx.xxxxxx, -yy.yyyyyy " />
• <meta name="DC.title" content=" your site name here " />

To the best of my knowledge there has never been an official explanation of what happened with GeoURL, or whether it will ever return. From scanning search engines I did however locate the following (although I cannot confirm authenticity):

On an email list dubbed Geowanking, one of the main names associated with GeoURL, Joshua Schachter, allegedly posted this on Sept 15th 2004:

I'm looking for a new home for it, still. It needs a rewrite for performance reasons and has considerable bandwidth and CPU requirements...

Another weblog cited Christopher Schmidt's e-mail to the rdfweb-dev mailing list which had this to say about it:

Officially, no word about it.
Unofficially, it was a sideline project by someone who didn't have time to run it anymore, and won't be coming back.

Why the owners of GeoURL don't publish some sort of statement on their website other than "We are down for renovations. Check back soon!" I do not know. What I do know is that I'm removing the tags - there seems little point in keeping them there.

If the problem is a financial one (for hosting costs), the sheer volume of traffic pointing to that site would have at least generated enough advertising income to cover costs I would've thought. Unfortunately as blogs get redesigned the tags are removed as redundant, and obviously no new ones are being added. For a site that had such a large membership of registered weblogs in particular, it seems a shame that the owners just blew away all that goodwill. If nothing else they probably could've sold it on to a commercial venture for a tidy sum ..anything would be better than that text-only page with the words "We are down for renovations. Check back soon!" message month after month. So long GeoURL, it was a good idea while it lasted.

..update 15th Feb 2005..

The original GeoURL site, now dubbed 'GeoURL 2.0', has been updated with a nice NASA graphic and the following notice

The new site will be opened up to the public on or around Friday, February 18th, 2005 - please be patient. :-)

Thanks Bjorn, looking forward to it!