Yesterday outside.in launched a preview of our new discussion boards, where visitors can talk with people around them, ask questions, give answers, rant, weigh in, and so forth.
Now, everyone knows that online discussion boards have been around since almost the beginning of time. So why is this a noteworthy event?
Because outside.in takes the ancient notion of the online discussion board and makes it local. Not just local like some bulletin boards that have a few different boards for a few large cities – LOCAL local. Local in several different ways.
To start with, every city, town, village and hamlet* has a discussion board of their very own. So you can address a question to the people who live around you, and know that it’s going to be viewed by the people around you.
To give you an example, here’s the discussion board for Brooklyn, the city I live in now. Here’s the discussion board for San Francisco, where I lived previously to Brooklyn. And here’s San Anselmo, the little town north of San Francisco where I grew up. Every town in the entire U.S. has a discussion board of its own, just like these, and when you post to the discussion boards at outside.in, you are addressing the people in these towns.
Then, beyond cities and towns, each neighborhood within our featured cities have their own discussion board as well. So you can start a discussion or make a comment to just the people in your neighborhood, too. Here’s the discussion board for the Haight in San Francisco, for example.
Then, beyond THAT, discussion threads get associated with each individual place they reference. So, say you’re talking about the evictions that just took place at 475 Kent Avenue in Brooklyn. If that place has been referenced before in our system, the discussion boards will detect it and associate your post with the outside page for that place. If it’s not in our system, we invite you to give it a place manually (which takes about ten seconds), and thereafter it IS in our system as a place, with your Discussion post attached.
All of these different levels of locality then stack up vertically – place, neighborhood and city all nested together. So if you post a question about a restaurant in Hayes Valley, SF, it not only shows up on the Hayes Valley discussion board, it shows up on the San Francisco discussion board, as well as on the page of the restaurant itself – where other people interested in that restaurant can find it and learn from it, or post their own response to it. In other words, the conversation gets indexed at all of the different levels of zoom that are relevant to it.
What does all of this mean?
Specifically, it means that you can now have conversations online with the people around you – whether that means people in your neighborhood or your city or your town of 5,000.
In the broader picture, it means online conversations can now be indexed and referenced by location. That means that all of the conversations over time about a place become associated with that place, and become part of the record about that place. Locations everywhere become annotated with the conversations you have about those places. Your conversations add value to the places around you, and the places and things around you come more into focus by the conversations associated with them.
That’s online discussion boards, outside style. Please check ‘em out and say hi to your neighbors.
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*in the U.S. only right now. More countries coming soon, we promise!
