We’ve just rolled out a new feature here at outside.in: Neighbor interests. This is your opportunity to tag your own Neighbor page with the categories you’re interested in: books, yoga, parenting, Battlestar Galactica. You might include your profession, your ethnicity, your favorite musician — it’s up to you to define your own interests, as general or as specific as you want.
To add interests to your Neighbor page, log in to outside.in, and select “edit my Neighbor page” from the upper right-hand box. While you’re there, you should upload a photo and bio if you haven’t done so already.
These interests will appear on your Neighbor page, with links to all the stories tagged with those interests for your home city. For example, you can see on my Neighbor page that one of my interests is coffee, and it’s one click from that Neighbor page to an overview of all stories tagged coffee in Brooklyn.
Those tag overviews are a really useful way to explore what’s happening in your community. We list top tags for each city in the left-hand margin. Certain cities tend to be dominated by a trend, such as Boston and politics and Portland, OR and food.
Let’s say you want to be a bit more local in your search. You can start by going to your home zip code or neighborhood, look through the posts and see what piques your interest. Click on a tag to explore–it will bring up all stories for that area that have the same tag. (You can also do this directly via the URL; outside.in/brooklyn_ny/tags/music and outside.in/brooklyn_ny/tags/shopping are two of my favorites.)
We hope you’ll have fun tagging yourself, and see what interesting content you can discover on the site via tags.
