Did I invent these meta tags or are they official?

Odd that many sites now use these tags...

[Ducki]

Back around 1997 or so I created some meta tags for my own internal purposes. Now I see them all over the web. While I know everyone in my industry was simply copying our code and following my lead, what about the rest of the sites on the net who use these? Is their any official purpose for them or are people simply copying each other blindly?

The first two I see quite frequently while the last two much less so.

<meta NAME="city" CONTENT="">
<meta NAME="state" CONTENT="">
<meta NAME="email" CONTENT="">
<meta NAME="contact" CONTENT="">

Inquiring minds want to know ;-)

[g1smd]

Blind copying. The contact can be useful to some users if it states a way to contact the webmaster if that is not already specified somewhere in the normal site content. All those tags are useless for searchengines and/or SEO (except that Google might manually use the contact data to alert a webmaster about a site problem - though nowadays they prefer to let you know through WMT reports).