I don’t see what good that would do, unless the user were one of the few that have dedicated IP addresses.
I know that for me, while I live in Los Angeles, the IP block that PacBell/SBC/AT&T/Whatever-they-are-calling-themselves-this-week is registered in Irvine… some 75 miles from my house.
I’d suspect that those in small towns are using small-town ISPs.
Bottom line is that the geo-IP is going to extrapolate the data based on where the IP block you’re using is assigned to, and you might find it to be local and you might not.
Interestingly, I don’t have a city listed on my home computer now, but when I lived in Sacramento, it identified itself as Sacramento (which was correct), and when I signed on the other day from a computer at graduate school, it listed location as New York City (which also was correct).
Nevertheless, it provides an explanation for why my IP, actually registered in Santa Rosa, and static, comes up as San Rafael here. GOip’s demo site hands me San Francisco, and got another of these services to hand me Rohnert Park. All of those answers are between 40 and 100 miles away from my actual location, of course. Whether or not analyzing user entered address data tied to IP will produce anything more accurate than simply presenting the registration address is debateable, but these services can sell it.
