After several months of hard work we’re happy to announce the launch of outside.in’s GeoToolkit—the first and only set of tools designed specifically for local content creators. Since the founding of outside.in, we’ve been focused on celebrating and promoting placebloggers and others who write about neighborhood faces and places. (Feel free to take a celebratory sip of bubbly right…now). We hope that by using GeoToolkit, those publishers will become even better at what they do. We’ve got lots more goodies on the way, so stay tuned.

GeoToolkit helps both publishers who write full and part-time time (the occasional story about a diner, a local policy meeting, new construction, playground moment, or great new local store) get better distribution on our site and our partners’ sites, as well as amazing stats to get more connected to their neighborhoods. Still to come: gnarly widgets and the option to start making some money$.

http://outside.in/toolkit

Here’s a sneak peak of what’s inside:

My Feed optimizes your site for the geoweb. It automatically locates the places and neighborhoods mentioned in your stories, and lets you add new ones to our database. By connecting your posts to places and neighborhoods, links to those stories will appear throughout outside.in, and across our growing list of partner sites.

My Stats has unique analytics about your site and its connection to the neighborhood. You can track which neighborhoods you write most about vs. other bloggers, see how you rank on certain places or topics, see which stories generate the most links, and which websites are linking the most to you.

So if you have a website or blog, check out GeoToolkit. We’d love to hear what you think.