Learning More About Outside.in with John Geraci

Have you entertained the idea of building a location-based mobile application?

Outside.in really has the potential to offer up the killer mobile app. It organizes info on the web by location, down to very granular levels, so it’s a natural fit for mobile devices. If you’re out on the town and want to know what’s new and interesting around you, outside.in is in a pretty unique position to answer that question, seeing as we’re tracking everything people are saying online about the things around you, organized by neighborhood name, venue, etc. That could be really powerful on your mobile device. The only problem at the moment is the actual interaction between the site and the phone, knowing where you are and so forth. That’s something that has always held mobile apps back because it’s rough and there’s no common way to go about it. We think that problem will be solved soon, so expect to see an outside.in mobile application in the near future.

How would Outside.in potentially work with a citywide newspaper? Do you see potential synergy with the online content sites for daily papers?

Absolutely, and we’re working on partnerships with some major players in this area right now. Newspapers are pretty hot on the idea of outside.in. They’re all hearing day in and day out that the traditional model of news is done for, and are looking around for ways to modernize the idea of news reporting. They want to start to bring down the wall between newspapers and blogs a bit, and see how the two can interact and build on each other. And that idea, of blogs and newspapers interacting, is pretty central to outside.in. So there’s a lot of mutual interest there.

Are there any plans to syndicate Outside.in with other websites or content providers?

Syndication is totally central to our approach. We’ve already doing it in several ways. One, you can grab an RSS feed for anything on the site – that means you can tap into our feed for a neighborhood, or a particular place like a restaurant, or a topic in your area, like crime, and get everything that’s being said on that subject in raw form. Then, one step up from that, is the Neighborhood News widget, which allows anyone to run local headlines from Outside.in on their blog via a widget. Finally, there’s an API that we make available to partner sites who want to display local headlines from the blogosphere, but who want more control than the widget gives you. We’re currently talking with a bunch of sites about using this API as test cases, and should have a few up and running by early November.

Thanks, John!

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