Posts FromJune, 2008

26
Jun 08

Kudos to Crime Solving Local Bloggers

Posted by josh in General / News — View Comments

This morning the New York Times had an article titled “Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid.”

Participant’s on the BayRidgeTalk.com message board started talking about the suspicious activity and noise around a house in the neighborhood. Posts such as “Fighting and drug deals going down in the driveway of this house,” started appearing. Several neighbors also attended local community board meetings, filed complaints, and eventually got the attention of the police, who started a narcotics investigation which led to the arrest of three suspects on charges of conspiracy, drugs, and weapons charges.

This story is a great example of the way hyperlocal content starts dialogue, which can rally people, and then lead to action. Best summarized by a local pet shop owner involved on the site, “At the end of the day, it was about putting aside anonymity, putting aside the HTML and physically showing up.” Great advice for all of us to get up, get out, and meet our neighbors. And blog about it, of course.

Congratulations BayRidgeTalk.com.

25
Jun 08

Outside.in Virtual Railsconf — Now a Monthly Ruby Happy Hour

Posted by Cory in Events / General — View Comments

We had such a good time at our Ruby-and-Rails get-together last week that we want to keep it going.  Starting on July 9th, we’ll be hosting a Ruby Happy Hour with pizza and beer every 2nd Wednesday of the month, from 7-9pm at our offices in Dumbo (20 Jay Street, Suite 1019, Brooklyn, NY 11201).

We’ll send reminders to the nyc.rb mailing list and via twitter, so follow us on twitter and watch the nyc.rb list to stay informed.  Hope to see you on the 9th!

25
Jun 08

update on outside.in virtual railsconf

Posted by Cory in Events / General — View Comments

We had a great turnout at our virtual railsconf last week and met a lot of fun rubyists. We spent most of the time getting to know each other and having some good conversations about the state of the art in Rails and Ruby. We also watched a MagLev presentation from RailsConf, and even had an impromptu presentation on BeanStalk. I was surprised to find that there were a lot of Rubyists working within just a few blocks of our office here in Dumbo. Here are some pictures we took at the event:

miniRailsConfEast

miniRailsConfEast

20
Jun 08

Busy Week…

Posted by mark in Development & Features / General — View Comments

It’s been quite a week here at outside.in since the launch of Radar — each day has been bigger than the one before it and we’ve gotten a ton of feedback from outside.in neighbors, new and old.

We felt that letting users put themselves at the center of their own content world — rather than making users fit themselves into a predefined zip code or area was a pretty powerful and cool idea — but you’re never really sure until you get lots of people using it and giving you feedback.

We’ve heard some amazing examples of people using Radar to discover important things happening right around them…that they would never have known. We would love to hear even more examples, so please tell us what you’ve found on your Radar.

We’ve also gotten some constructive feedback on things that can be even better…and we are taking it all to heart. Our list of “things to do to make Radar and outside.in even better” is long and we are hacking away at it 24/7.

So, thanks to all of the new neighbors who joined us this week at outside.in and please keep the feedback coming our way.

We’ll leave you with some nice mentions we had elsewhere.

18
Jun 08

outside.in hosts virtual RailsConf tonight — with beer

Posted by Cory in Events / General — View Comments

Only one of our developers was able to make it to Portland for Railsconf this year, so we’re going to try to simulate the experience at our office tonight.

From 7-9pm we’ll be projecting videos from RailsConf2008 (possibly supplementing with some Ruby- and Rails-related videos from Confreaks) on the wall of our office in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. Everyone is invited to join us. Beer and pizza will be provided.

Details:

Where: outside.in offices at 20 Jay Street Suite 1019 (10th Floor), Brooklyn, NY 11201

When: 7-9pm tonight, June 18th

16
Jun 08

outside.in Radar Now Live and in Beta

Posted by john in Development & Features / General / News — View Comments

I’m happy to announce that outside.in’s Radar is now live on the site and open for all to play with. Radar is our new feature that places you at the center of things and shows you the news going on around you as it happens. Like a Facebook feed for local news, it delivers stories near you in simple, one-line snippets, letting you see everything going on nearby easily, and letting you then click off to the individual stories that interest you.

Radar, as the name would suggest, organizes the news in dynamic, concentric circles around you. First it looks for news immediately around you, within 1000 feet. Then it searches for stories in your neighborhood. Then, in your city. And if you’re out in the middle of the desert somewhere, where there are no neighborhoods or cities, it will just keep on going until it finds something, then will ping it back to you. Just like the real thing.

What I like about Radar is that it drastically reduces the work involved in finding out what’s going on around you. No more sifting through various pages to find things near you that are interesting, no more scrolling down hundreds of lines of ledes to find the one story that catches your eye. The whole landscape of local online content is laid out before you in one simple cascade of headlines, along with their corresponding topics and places. It’s the easiest way around to get the goods on your local scene.

You can even take this whole ‘what’s interesting around me’ idea one step further, by specifying which places and topics are of particular interest to you. The feature will make note of that and call special attention to stories about those topics and places as they come on to your page.

Then, once you’ve set your Radar for your specific location and the topics/places that interest you, you can create an alert, to receive instant notification of things going on around you.

Add to this the neighbor alerts feature, which allows everyone to write directly and immediately to the pages of people in their area, and Radar becomes a total readable/writeable local content solution.

And that’s it in a nutshell: Radar! Give it a try now!

Oh, one more thing – today with the launch of Radar we’re also embarking on a campaign to continually add more and more content to outside.in, especially in those areas that are currently thinner than others. So expect to see more stories of interest popping onto your Radar more often and with greater volume over the next several months.

13
Jun 08

outside.in Radar Launch Coming on Monday!

Posted by john in Development & Features / General — View Comments

Everyone at outside.in has been working hard this week to put the finishing touches on Radar 1.0, and it now looks like a general beta launch is just around the corner. On Monday morning, if everything goes as planned, you should be able to jump out of bed and rush to your computer to try out our newest, coolest feature. (or stumble out of bed, get some coffee, hop in the shower, and log into Radar at work).

I wrote earlier today that Radar is my favorite part of outside.in now. It’s the first part of the site that really operates in the first person – it’s about what’s going on around me, where I am now. All of the other views on the site are plenty interesting and useful, but when you see a story pop up right around the corner from your home, about a place you walk by every day, it’s a totally different feeling, and it brings a different meaning to the notion of local. Local is what’s around you – Radar is built with that in mind.

We’re all happy to see Radar launch, and we’re excited about the improvements we’ve made to it since our limited alpha launch two weeks ago (among other things, we’re now tracking Twitter in neighborhoods, we’ve added instant alerts for items in your immediate area, we’ve improved the neighbor status feature). We’re also looking forward to getting other interesting ideas into the feature as soon as possible. This is, after all, a 1.0, and is a pretty simple rollout. We’ve got some good ideas for ways to make it better, and you’ll be seeing those soon. If you have any ideas yourselves for things you’d like to see, please tell them to us at feedback@outside.in.

See you on Monday, on Radar…

11
Jun 08

A Passion for Place, the New Pamphleteers/New Reporters Conference in Minneapolis

Posted by josh in Events / General — View Comments

“Your readers are citizens” was one of great comments by John Nichols of the Capital Times at last week’s Journalism That Matters: New Pamphleteers/New Reporters conference in Minneapolis. The theme of the conference was “A Passion for Place,” so naturally we had to attend. Placeblogging is something that outside.in not only celebrates but is focused on supporting. We gave a demo of Radar and our upcoming toolkit for bloggers, and talked with participants about how we can better support placebloggers of all sizes. The attendees ran the gamut from hyperlocal bloggers, to not-for-profit organizations like the j-lab and more established companies like YouTube and The Christian Science Monitor. The placeblogs came from all over; from more rural areas like the Kickapoo Valley in Wisconsin, and medium-city Milwaukee which was well represented by Urban Milwaukee and The Riverwest Neigborhood Network. Amazing efforts like Pegasus News in Dallas, NewWest, and BarristaNet (one of the earliest placeblogs dating back to 2004) all joined the conversation. The projects and attendees were an amazing group, so instead of going wild naming them all, I’ll simply link to the conference attendee list.

One of the themes of the conference was the way placeblogs not only break and comment on hyperlocal news but how they are community hubs that pull together residents on issues. They create dialog with local government and effect policy changes in their neighborhood. How do you measure this influence in addition to page views? A hard nut to crack. There was an ongoing dialog about tools and platforms. There was a Seattle start-up which gave a demo of what could be a placeblog specific version of the up-to-now more general and popular blogging platforms (like Blogger and WordPress). It is one of several like this that are under development. The more the merrier, of course, especially if they can send geotagged content directly to outside.in. There was a lot of talk about business models and how to sustain efforts. One constant at the conference was that all of the projects need better distribution, tools, and a revenue model, which makes outside.in perfectly positioned to help these efforts and solve some of the issues. Lastly, it was great to talk with YouTube as their new reporter channel will hopefully have a large hyperlocal slant.

As the conference ended there was talk of creating a space to continue the dialog and start a real resource for hyperlocal bloggers; a place to share advice, tools, and stories. When outside.in launches tools later in the summer for placebloggers of all sizes, we will become home to some of this. Right now an interesting place to start is the community that was launched for the conference. Feel free to explore and join even if you didn’t attend the conference.

4
Jun 08

Hyperlocal in the News

Posted by mark in General / News — View Comments

The story in today’s WSJ about The Washington Post’s LoudonExtra.com site struck a chord with us.

Full disclosure: WashPo is a partner of ours and uses our BuzzMaps as part of their hyperlocal efforts. We have continually seen smart ideas from them and applaud them for being so forward-thinking. It is a bit harsh to claim that LoudonExtra is a “flop.” The days of hyperlocal are fast arriving and the winners will be those that innovate, and nobody in the traditional media world is innovating as much as our friends at the WashPo.

The article does raise a couple of interesting questions, worthy of discussion.

First, the WSJ observes that “Loudon County is a 520 square-mile area with seven towns whose residents share little else besides a county government.” This hits home on our belief at Outside.in that any effort to define “local” or a “local content product” by aggregating users into zipcodes, counties or other method misses the boat. Our users today are demanding more control over and personalization of their content. For example, I find myself subscribing more and more to discrete feeds and newsletters, instead of reading the full papers or sections. This is available for almost every vertical BUT local. There are some interesting examples, but nobody has really found what we call “the intersection of local and personalization.” This is what we are addressing with Radar — a customized view of your world, determined by your location, filtered by the places and interests that matter to you and only you.

Second, the amount of original content created for LoudonExtra.com means that there is a great cost associated with building and maintaining the site. We are huge fans of the incredible group of individuals blogging about their local communities. The quantity and quality of these hyperlocal bloggers is exploding, and their ability to cover more news and information at the hyperlocal level far outweighs that of a hand-picked, full-time “traditional” editorial team. We are tracking more than 140 discrete hyperlocal content sources in Chicago alone, for example. (Great examples of hyperlocal news coverage are here and here.)

The challenge is in how do you aggregate the incredible content and package it as something of value to the traditional media companies? And, how can you provide traffic back from the traditional media sites to these independent content creators so that everyone benefits?

Which leads to…

Third, I understand why the Post says that they don’t “want LoudounExtra.com or future hyperlocal sites to be too dependent on Washingtonpost.com for traffic.” But, we’re at a critical point for traditional news companies. They know that their model must change and the really smart ones know that hyperlocal is (at least one of) the answers. Technology advancements and consumer demand (see above) will only accelerate that shift. But, these companies do have a significant amount of traffic that they can funnel to their hyperlocal products. They can use the next period of time to show their readers the future, and build an audience at these properties. Their readers will love it, and over time they can shift resources towards the more scalable model of aggregating and adding value on top. Jeff Jarvis says “Cover what you do best. Link to the rest.” We agree.

Interested in hearing your comments on this story and the ongoing debate of hyperlocal and traditional media, so please post away!

Mark


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