We are looking for a dynamic individual to lead our Product Development efforts.  He or she will help make sure our collective vision for a new platform for local media is executed flawlessly.

Specific responsibilities include working with the team to build and refine our overall product roadmap and scope the features, functionality, competitive positioning and performance of all of our products.

The ideal candidate should be a proven leader and have prior success at a revenue-focused online media company.  He/she should have experience running a product organization that includes new product development, project management, research, graphic and UI design. Experience with local media and the geo-web is a definite plus.

This is a hands-on job that requires deep knowledge and demonstrable industry-leading experience with all facets of online publishing, media and software, including:

• All types of online advertising, including national and local search and display
• Different types of ad pricing (i.e. CPM, CPC, CPA) and targeting (i.e. geo, behavioral, contextual, retargeting, etc..)
• Performance and conversion optimization
• Ad servers (i.e. DFP, OpenX, etc..)
• Ad networks and exchanges
• XML feed aggregation
• Content aggregation and syndication
• Consumer media destination businesses
• Semantic algorithms and NLP
• Search engine optimization
• Analytics and reporting
• UX and usability
• Development methodologies and Software Project Management

Additional Requirements

• College degree (MBA preferred) or equivalent experience
• Minimum 10 years online media experience
• Strong management skills
• A strong network of fellow industry leaders
• Superior interpersonal and communication skills
• Insatiable desire for “what’s next” in media and on the web

Outside.in is a fast-paced, high-growth company and values innovation, speed, quality and results.  We look for people who share those values.

Please send a link to your updated LinkedIn profile to careers@outside.in.

My colleague Jared provided a great commentary on this blog after the recent New Business Models for News Conference and HyperCamp at CUNY. Thought I’d add a few more thoughts from the revenue angle.

As Sean Blanda points out in his recap, and repeatedly expressed by the confab attendees, a major unmet need in the hyperlocal space is around selling. In other words, what I heard loud and clear is: “I need revenue!” As this conference re-affirmed, there are plenty of journalists, bloggers, publishers (large and small) who are producing and featuring hyperlocal content, the challenge is how does one monetize this content.

Not surprising… after all, who doesn’t want to make some money? But here is why this is interesting:

• No real mention of the usual self-service online sales route, such as Google or other ad networks). You can read into what is NOT being spoken aloud here… Google AdSense is not enough. Generating pennies off of clicks may work for the behemoth that is Google, but not for the independent local news site. Folks are well aware of how big the local ad market is ($100B+) and appear hungry to go after some of this big pie.

• I sensed a DIY attitude when it came to ad sales. Individual publishers want to know how to sell. Journalists may not “do spreadsheets” but maybe some will do sales? I’m usually a fan of the DIY mentality and entrepreneurial spirit, but to make local ad sales work, DIY will not cut it. Local networks need to form to provide scale and efficiency. Rather than you sell what’s yours and I sell what’s mine, how about the best person sell on behalf of everyone in the market?

• Not every hyperlocal site or news org should have to sell. The staff of the new news organization should focus on what they are good at, and in most cases, that will not be sales. The ability to sell is not something you teach and voila: You’re now making money. I wish it were that simple. Not only does it require recruiting the right people and training them properly, but you also need to equip them with the right tools and products to sell with, and most importantly, incentivize and motivate them to sell something that is not theirs. But local sales teams that have the skills and relationships already exist. The key is how to connect them with the relevant inventory that best services the advertisers… Sounds very similar to the challenge of connecting the big media folks to the local network of bloggers.

So, what does all this portend? Well, the future is still being shaped (by some of the folks there at the conference and other thought leaders and innovators), but a few things are clear on the ad sales front: Training will not be the answer and generating meaningful local dollars will require more cooperation and collaboration amongst the relevant parties. Yes, more group hugs are in order, as Jeff Jarvis insisted. And local networks being sold by the right sales teams will be the key in this new ecosystem.

By the end of yesterday’s New Business Models for News Conference at CUNY’s J-School, one thing was overwhelmingly clear: Bloggers want to get their content on major media sites and major media sites want this content.  Yet, according to these two groups, there remains a big problem: How to do it?  Upon hearing this, we at Outside.in felt great because Outside.in for Publishers delivers a solution to this problem.  Let me elaborate.

The so-called Reverse Panel, a rather clever idea on the part of Jeff Jarvis put this issue in relief.  Jeff put 6 forward-thinking “Big Players” (Jim Willse of the Star-Ledger, Jim Schachter of the NY Times, Jennifer Carroll of Gannett, Goli Sheikholeslami of the Washington Post, Jim Brady of Politico, and John Paton of ImpreMedia) at the table and asked the room full of bloggers, small publishers, and tech start-ups to tell the Big Players what we would like them to do.  What do we need from them?  What could they do to make our jobs easier?

The bloggers said, “We want you to give us visibility and traffic.  When we scoop a story that you like, we want you to put it on your site and give us the credit.”  The publishers agreed, saying they want the content, and in fact, they went so far as to claim, more than once, that without taking advantage of the great journalism happening on blogs, their businesses will fail.  Everyone agreed on this point.  The stumbling block was around the How.  How do the publishers surface the blogger content on their site in a fair, respectful, and mutually beneficial way?  What does that relationship look like?

That’s exactly what we’re working on. With Outside.in for Publishers, we’ve built a platform that enables publishers to display headlines, links, and summaries of blogger content on their sites.  It generates hyperlocal ad inventory for publishers and gives traffic and visibility to bloggers. Essentially, we’re making this relationship easy.  OIP is automated yet full of opportunities for customization.  Publishers can choose the sources from which they get content.  If they’re really picky, they can even select the stories that come from those trusted sources.  The editor becomes a curator of the blogosphere; the tools are in their hands.

Many publishers have already begun their work with Outside.in for Publishers, yet of the panel members, only the New Jersey division of Gannett (represented by Jennifer Carroll) has taken advantage of the service.  So, to you others I pose an honest question: if you know you need to leverage the blogosphere, what’s holding you back from using Outside.in for Publishers?  Every day we’re improving our platform.  I encourage you tell us exactly what you need so that we can help you hurdle the stumbling block of the How.

Do you love talking to bloggers? In fact, are some of your friends bloggers and do you correspond with them on Twitter all day? Do you find yourself thinking hard about bloggers’ place in journalism and society and what their successful business models might look like? Do you write about these ideas?  Do you think you are or would you like to become the center of The Blogosphere? And do you want to get paid for it?

If you answered yes to any or all of the above questions or if just hearing them for the first time piques your interest, then read on.  Outside.in is hiring a Community Manager, and you may be perfect for the job.

The Outside.in Community Manager is the company’s dedicated liaison to local bloggers across the country and is primarily responsible for the development of a loyal, active and engaged community.

The Community Manger will be passionate about local bloggers, and dedicated to their success and to Outside.in’s mission to help grow their business.  Outstanding written and verbal skills are a must, as is the ability to create a plan, act quickly, track results and quickly adapt.

The position reports to the Director of Partner Relations.

Responsibilities include:

• Maintain Outside.in’s blog and other public channels; ensuring that they become effective two-way tools for communication
• Author blog posts, articles, tweets, podcasts or other ways to communicate the benefits of Outside.in and use of Outside.in to our customers.
• Create a vibrant community of customers through education, outreach, events and other customer engagement strategies.
• Foster a sense of community around our brand at the product and corporate level
• Grow GeoToolkit’s user base, including but not limited to creating and executing plans to increase the number of users
• Research and provide input, as a representative of the blogging community, in the development of Outside.in for Bloggers products
• Monitor key online conversations and events to make sure Outside.in is participating effectively & is being represented.
• Respond to user comments, questions, and requests regarding both GeoToolkit and Outside.in’s core site
• Learn our products inside and out and be able to drive users’ questions and issues to resolution

Potential candidates could have backgrounds in marketing, community management, audience engagement, blogging, or journalism.  The ideal candidate will already be immersed in social media and online communities and have a robust online profile for our review.  Having created a Twitter account with thousands of followers is a plus!

Please send us a link to your online presence as your application to jobs@outside.in.

Thanks for your patience last night while we made some important upgrades.  The site has been up and running, rather snappily, since late last night.

You may resume enjoying the news around you.

The scheduled maintenance we tweeted about tonight is still under way.

Please be patient while we improve your neighborhood news. We’ll be able to tell you what’s going on about your door again soon.

Check this post our our Twitter account for updates.

update: And we’re back, stronger and faster than ever!

Shiny Engine! by Terrence Tak-Shing Tam on Flickr

Until last week, the software architecture powering our core site at outside.in was a standard Ruby on Rails application stack sitting on top of a set of PostgreSQL databases, with various aggressive caching strategies in play on the front end. It was no surprise that the setup began showing its limitations as site traffic ramped up. True to our aspirations to become a high-traffic destination, we were becoming victims of our own success, and as a result our scaling challenge was real. Page load times, overall throughput, and latency for new content all began to degrade as databases grew. And we faced a queue of new products and enhancements our over-caffeinated product team was excited to launch, each a big driver of additional traffic. We endeavored to meet the challenge with a carefully planned re-imagining of the OI platform. Here’s a high-level look at what it entailed.

Earlier this year we had the opportunity to build a new product and business, Outside.in for Publishers, from scratch.  We maximized that opportunity by rethinking the core data models and the way we handle geometric calculations, with primary goals of speed for users and minimal latencies for content acquisition. With the OIP launch, we also unleashed a new framework for content acquisition, code-named Feed Monster, which can happily overpower any mere mortal relational database with its light-speed content analysis and row insert pressure. We were very effectively adding capacity for crawling and content analysis, but not keeping pace publishing new content because of relational bottle-necking. After the launch of OIP, we plotted a road map to bring the speed optimizations of OIP to the core site and handle the Feed Monster volume without breaking a sweat…with a few other tricks in the mix.

So, on to the specifics. The knowns we started with were:

• Relational databases are slow when they become large.
• For all its elegance and productivity, Ruby is slow to execute.
• Geometry, even with a mature system like PostGIS, is slow and hugely resource-intensive at scale.

• Denormalize content and metadata into a search-based structure
• Move the heavy-lifting out of Ruby and into a faster stack by building a cluster of “datajoiners.”
• Intelligently cache long-lived data in the datajoiner, where it is most flexibly utilized for various output types.

Denormalizing data into a set of search indices in a master/slave clustered environment enables very fast content retrieval without the overhead of relational integrity. We apply our computing resources at content processing time to make locating and displaying content very lightweight. We have accomplished this by embracing Apache Lucene and building some clever code to shard indexing across the farm.

Datajoiners are a set of servers that power content delivery to our internal APIs and front-end applications. The new middleware tier is built on the Java Virtual Machine in Scala, where we can take full advantage of multiple cores for parallelization with minimal effort. The datajoiner’s purpose is to take data from disparate sources, like PostgreSQL, Lucene, key value stores, and memory caches, and to speedily produce an output suitable for any of our consumers.

In the area of language performance, we knew we would be introducing a compromise between the development speed of a dynamic language, Ruby, and the execution speed and threading of a JVM-based one. We chose Scala for the datajoiner because it offers a bit, although I won’t say the best, of both worlds. Scala is a young language with its share of warts, but shows tremendous promise. With type inference, its myriad syntactic conveniences, and fast run-time performance, Scala served us well in this area of our architecture.  And ultimately performance handily exceeded our goals. Under massive load scenarios, we are able to service 8 to 10 front-end Rails web servers with each of these datajoiners without compromising page load time or requests per second.

Finally, we revisited caching and baked it into the datajoiner layer. Typically caching is done as close to the front-end as possible to reduce resource usage by serving stale data. In our case, caching policies can be applied at a very granular level such that content is served in near realtime without staleness, while long-lived data structures like region containment are efficiently cached for long periods. With the data assembly work being done in Scala, we are able to push tons of data into the system and serve it out without sacrificing freshness.

So, as Lauren says, welcome to the new Outside.in! I hope this post provides a useful peek behind the scenes of our most recent effort. I’m extremely proud of the team for bringing this to life, and it is incredibly rewarding for us to see it working flawlessly in the wild. The only thing that excites me more right now is the bright future of possibility our new platform represents. Stay tuned for a host of new stuff that will be powered by our new engine!

Last Monday night around 7 p.m. we quietly launched a brand-new new site at Outside.in.

The new version of our site will help you you find out what’s happening wherever you are. Read on for the details of how you can use the new Outside.in to find the most relevant hyperlocal content quickly and easily—and for some information on what’s coming up next.

Search by Address, Neighborhood, City, or Place Name

Our homepage now features a single search box that can tell you what’s happening wherever you are (in the U.S. of course!). This shiny new search engine intelligently combines a few types of searches we’ve offered for awhile (address, neighborhood, ZIP, and city search) and adds a new one (place search). Now we evaluate your query to determine what you’re searching for and show you different results based on your input.

You can search from the homepage for:

• Address: Enter your exact address to get news stories and blog posts within 1,000 feet of you. For instance, searching for “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC” will show you what’s going on within 1,000 feet of the White House. This is the technology we formerly called “Radar,” but it’s now been integrated into our core experience so you can get radar results (now known as “Nearby News”) without going to a different section of our site.
• Neighborhood, city, state, ZIP: You can also search for your neighborhood, city, state, or ZIP code to find all the news we’ve collected in the areas that matter to you. Check out examples of our news in Chinatown, Boston; Portland, OR; 90210; and all of Texas. Don’t mess with the biggest page on our site!
• Place: The homepage search box can also get you to news about your favorite places, such as your alma mater (mine is Georgetown University), the park down the street from your office (ours is Brooklyn Bridge Park), or that book store that your West Coast friends claim is better than The Strand (Powell’s Books).

You can also search for regions, addresses, or places in the bottom search box of any internal page. You’ll notice that we’ve pre-filled that field with the name of the region you’re currently viewing (or the region that contains the place or address you’re currently viewing) but you can overwrite that default with the city, neigbhorhood, ZIP code, address, or place you want to search for next.

Keyword Search in Your Neighborhood

Since I just mentioned that you should be doing your neighborhood, address, and place searches from the bottom box on internal pages, you may be wondering what you’re supposed to do with the top box. That’s for something totally new: keyword search within your neighborhood or city, at a place, or at any address!

We’ve always brought you news and stories at the most granular geographic level, now you can refine your search even further by searching for topics that interest you. Here are some examples:

• Enter “art” in the top search box and “Little Tokyo, Los Angeles” in the bottom box to find news about art in Little Tokyo.
• Type “events” in the top search box and “Museum of Modern Art” in the bottom search box to read about recent and upcoming events at MoMA.
• Put “food” in the top search box and “300 Bartlett St., San Francisco, CA” to find out where to eat after hanging out at the Mission branch of the San Francisco Public Library.

Streamlined Site Design

We’ve also simplified the user experience on Outside.in significantly. Our new design is stripped of clutter and provides much clearer, more legible fonts—especially for page headers and news headlines. Compare the before and after of our Austin, TX page:

Austin Before

Austin After

This is just the first of many iterations of our new site design. We’ll be tracking the success of these new templates with a variety of engagement metrics to see what helps our users (that’s you!) find the most interesting content and content publishers (bloggers and news sites) get the most traffic. We aim to help you find a ton of content you care about, so you’ll see us testing lots of different templates and features.

RSS Feeds Galore

My favorite offering on our new site is the RSS feeds we’re generating for every page so you can take our news with you. We’ve always published feeds for city, neighborhood, ZIP, and topic pages, but now you can subscribe to news within 1,000 feet of any address; news about any place; or topic searches for your favorite region, address, or place.

You can find the RSS feeds in the toolbar of your browser, linked from the footer of any page, or by adding “.rss” to the end of any URL.

Just add the feed URL to your favorite feed reader (such as Google Reader, Bloglines, or News Gator), and you’ll automatically see new stories as we find them.

Proximity Matters

One of the most interesting challenges in hyperlocal is the mind-boggling number of regions and places with the same name. We’ve taken a first crack at tackling this issue on our new site, and are hoping for your feedback in improving our efforts.

If your input to our homepage search box matches more than one region or place in the U.S., we’ll send you to the one closest to the city we detected from your IP address (don’t worry, we’re keeping your location top-secret at OI World HQ!) and show suggested links to other regions and places with the same name. For instance, looking for “St. Petersburg” from a New York IP address will take you to our region page for St. Petersburg, PA, but if you’re coming at us from an IP in Georgia we’ll take you to my hometown, St. Petersburg, FL, instead.

Either way, we’ll show you links underneath the page header that you can use to easily get to other matches if we didn’t guess the one you were looking for.

The same goes for places! Searching for “Starbucks” from my Brooklyn IP address brings me to our news about the Starbucks in Park Slope, but if you did the same search from Seattle, we’d take you to a Starbucks in Broadway/Capitol Hill instead.

Naturally, giving us more information in the search box (specifying “St. Petersburg, FL” or “Starbucks, Broadway”) will take you directly to the region or place you had in mind.

Stronger, Faster Technology

Our CTO Andy Parsons will be posting later today on the new platform that’s powering all this goodness.

[update: Read all about our new infrastructure!]

What’s Next

Upcoming features to the site will be focused on providing you with the most targeted, personalized local information available. We want to vanquish information overload by helping you find only the most relevant content—and find it quickly. Ideas we’re brewing include ways to filter and sort our content and get alerts for the stories that matter most.

Feedback? Questions? Suggestions? We want to hear from you. Drop your thoughts in the comments or send us an email at contact@outside.in.

Hello bloggers! We’ve consolidated our individual blogger HQs into one destination site since we see a connection between all hyperlocal bloggers, regardless of the town, city, or places you write about. You may want to read our introductory post and watch the fun video we made to illustrate the blogger-publisher connection we’re facilitating as part of the new news ecosystem. Both should explain a bit about why we’ve created a destination site for you, the local bloggers that make up the backbone of the geoweb.

We’ll be laying out tips and tricks of hyperlocal blogging, and we’ll also be interviewing writers who have great local blogs (this means you! If you’re interested in being featured here, send us a note). We hope to be the common thread to link you together and connect you with ideas and other bloggers to help inspire you in your craft of writing about place.

Jump into the conversation in the comments on the new site and feel free to suggest your blog or other greats in your area–and make sure that your blog is included in our system to grow your audience and take advantage of our blogger tools!

Check it out! –> http://oibloggerHQ.outside.in

Come on down to the Clark Street Ale House this Friday, October 23, at 6pm for drinks with your fellow local bloggers. Outside.in’s Director of Partner Relations Jared Ranere will be your host, so you can pick his brain on everything hyperlocal and ask questions about outside.in and Geotoolkit—and the first round is on us! Feel free to blog about this or share the invite with any hyperlocal bloggers you know in the Chicago area.

Please RSVP. We’ll randomly select a blogger from the RSVP list to win a fun outside.in prize. Hope to see you there!