We are looking at building geo tagging posts as a plugin.
The use case for us is that since we’re working with real estate information, the topics created in our instance could have many different replies based on location. We could ask our community members to include a location in the body whenever they create a new topic (“my question relates to Springfield”), but this is cumbersome, highly non-systematic, and will lead to very similar topics/questions being asked numerous times. This will also quickly make for messy searching down the road.
We would prefer to have multiple possible valid responses to a single topic, and allow the responders to choose what location their post applies to, although in our case we won’t make location data required. This also won’t prevent somebody from creating a topic with a very specific geographic focus, and that’s fine.
The most flexible approach I can think of is to have post authors enter a location and then drop a pin on a Google map. The pin coordinates are stored as additional post data, and then the topics and posts content can be rounded up into all kinds of somewhat arbitrary geographic containers. In real estate, people get very creative about what they call a location - state/province, city, unofficial neighborhood, etc. So coordinates seem like a more versatile location definition point.
Our ultimate goal is to be able to offer feeds based on geographic areas.
Let me know if you’re interested.