There's a real trend these days towards tying some of the advantages of the modern "web," such as it is, to actual physical spots on the planet. You heard it here first. (Hey, it was news to me when I thought of it this morning.) I started digging yesterday for something that would connect Twitter, currently my worst online addiction, to place. Twitter creates such a cloud of really touching information about people you know and want to know. But as things stand, there's no easy way to connect that data to my geographical location on the planet. That a good friend of mine is having coffee somewhere on 7th Avenue here in Park Slope is mixed in with the news that an acquaintance in Nairobi is contemplating the new power-sharing arrangement there.

I haven't managed to dig up any sort of app or tool that really ties Twitter to geography in a way that makes all that information useful to me as I go about my day. But I expect something like that is on more than one developer's drawing board, and will see it very soon.

But even in the absence of a useful geo-Twitter app, we do see on the horizon an embracing of geography as useful and meaningful. Outside.in is an online aggregator that pulls blogs in blog posts that have some sort of location information embedded or tagged. And then there's Fire Eagle. This new tool from Yahoo is still in the invite-only stage, but what it does is to collect an update on my location status from me either via the web, SMS, or third-party applications (in much the same ways that Twitter can be pinged.) Outside.in is launching a new feature called On My Radar that uses Fire Eagle to create a stream of information connected, they say, down to the very block you're standing on at the moment. And both Outside.in and Yahoo are partners in the new OpenSocial Foundation that launched yesterday, laying a foundation for a lot more of these place-tied web projects.

Of course, while I was never much into Dodgeball, that was an early attempt to tie digital info to geography. I'm not sure why it never took off. But this next round of tools is probably more welcomed today with people more accustomed -- because of Twitter, Facebook status lines, and the like -- to informing the web what they're up to on a regular basis. (Photo thx practicalowl.)

UPDATE: Ah, just stumbled upon Fireball: Twitter + Fire Eagle = Fireball. Exactly. Off to play with it...

UPDATE DOS: Carlo Scannella writes to say that Outside.in's Steven Johnson was talking up Twitter integration at a session at Parsons last week...