outside.in is a new site from ‘Everything That’s Bad Is Good For Ya’ author Steven Berlin Johnson. It’s a service that allows users to find out what’s being written about their neighborhoods. When bloggers write about local issues or events, they can tag each post and a link and extract will show up on the outside.in site. The site says:
Every day, the web collects new essential information about your local community: the open house around the corner; a restaurant review in the local paper; a rant from a parent about a declining public school; a concert that’s just been announced; a police report on a recent break-in; gossip about a celebrity sighting. But while that information is all grounded in a real-world place, on the web it is scattered everywhere: in blogs, online newspapers, discussion threads, government sites.
Users can also categorize entries with their own tags.
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Yet another US-centric site that is useless to the other 95% of the planet. Does it not occur to people that the bulk of the planet does not have 5 digit zip codes. Did it not occur to them that there are neighborhoods in any other countries, and that these would broaden the appeal and interest of their site?
October 26th, 2006 at 1:24 am
Good point Barry. I agree.
I do think it’s a great idea though.
October 27th, 2006 at 9:42 am
I think that, at the end, there’s a much greater long tail of geographic content out there, than the limited universe of X US cities as commented in Y blogs, and the strategy of letting users geotagging their own stuff directly on maps (the approach of Tagzania and others) may be better. That’s what we hope at Tagzania, at least.
October 31st, 2006 at 12:23 am