Posts FromJanuary, 2009

30
Jan 09

Atlantans Together Against Crime

Posted by Jared in Uncategorized — View Comments

AtlantansTogether.org recently put a StoryMap on their site. They introduce themselves much better than I can:

Atlantans Together Against Crime (ATAC) has been established in response to the wave of violent crime that is taking over our city. More and more we hear stories of friends and family being assaulted, robbed at gunpoint, and now, just recently, murdered. The increase in violent crime is staggering – and heartbreaking – but as these stories become more and more common, city officials are cutting back the police force and claiming crime is on the decline.

This clarity of social purpose highlights one of the most exciting aspects of working with hyperlocal bloggers, helping them grow their readership, and helping those readers find the stories that matter to them most.  Local blogs and small online publishers can certainly help plug the holes in the cost structures of major newspapers, but that is not their only utility.  Much like journalism in an ideal state, sites like ATAC commit to distributing important information to their neighbors, fulfilling a societal need.  The more Atlantans know about the crime that’s happening in their community, the more connected to it they feel and the more inclined they are to do something about it.

ATAC serves this purpose as well as anybody, and we at outside.in are committed to helping them–and all local sites–grow.

(Get a map for your blog.)

29
Jan 09

Download This!

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

Since launching in the iTunes store two weeks ago, the outside.in Radar app has steadily grown in the rankings. We now have the #3 paid news app in all of iTunes land. Wow!  As Steven pointed out over on Boing Boing, there are lots of great uses for the app. We have some improvements to push out over the next week or so, and the updates will be seamless so keep those downloads coming, send us great use cases and leave some testimonials in the store!

29
Jan 09

Reading and Eating in Portland and Baltimore

Posted by Jared in Uncategorized — View Comments

Finally, I know something about Baltimore that I didn’t get from The Wire!  Adventures in Baltimore Restaurants is a high volume restaurant review and food news blog in Baltimore. The posts are thorough and frequent so you can get a lot of information fast and visit them frequently for updates.  AND…since they put up a StoryMap, you can quickly access reviews about restaurants in the Baltimore area you care about.  Just like any Wire watching foodie might expect, there are lots of orange pins around the Inner Harbor and scarcely any in West Baltimore.

Reading Local has caught a niche that is occupied in few cities and is particularly well-suited to Portland, OR: Book News.  It does an excellent job of tracking book-related events in Portland, such as a post including outside.in’s own Steven Johnson reading from his new book, The Invention of Air, at Powell’s City of Books.  Want to know what’s happening at your local bookstore?  Click on its pin on the StoryMap and you’ll see everything Reading Local has written about it.

Remind me to start a blog about great places to read books over dinner.

28
Jan 09

NBC Picks Outside.in for Hyperlocal

Posted by mark in Announcements / General / News — View Comments

We’re excited to announce a deal today with NBC Local Media to help them build out their nine new O&O sites. The new sites are positioned as the ultimate resource for “Locals Only” in each market and provide a comprehensive resource for what’s news and what’s hot in their market.  Press release is here.

This is all part of our plan to use our automation and aggregation platform to help media companies build a more sustainable long term business.

In order to deliver the “most local” site they could, NBC turned to Outside.in and our Neighborhood News Pages.  Outside.in’s Neighborhood News Pages  leverage our automated platform to aggregate tens of thousands of sources (blogs, news, traditional press, twitter tweets, etc…) and organize them by discrete geographic neighborhoods.

We created 650 of these Neighborhood News Pages for NBC, and now they are more local than ever before.

The beauty of these Neighborhood News Pages is that they really serve all of the key audiences:

  • Consumers get more personalized and targeted news.  What’s happening down the street from them.
  • Advertisers can target their buys to a more specific audience that’s not just IP targeted, but actually engaged in content withing specific geographic boundaries; and
  • NBC gets high quality hyperlocal editorial pages that cost a fraction of what it costs to build a “tradtional” editorial page and they actually are a great fit for Consumers and Advertisers.

Check out some of these Neighborhood News Pages covering the Lincoln Park, Chicago and Bella Vista, Philly hoods.

Congrats to Brian Buchwald and the team at NBC for their great sites and stay tuned for more partners coming soon.

26
Jan 09

StoryMap Highlights: Fresno and Milwaukee

Posted by Jared in Uncategorized — View Comments

Today we travel to Fresno and Milwaukee to feature StoryMaps on The Fresnan and Milwaukee Moments.

The Fresnan, a longtime GeoToolkit member whose stories are frequently featured at outside.in/fresno_ca, refers to itself as a “city-blog” and dutifully writes daily posts about events–mostly music and parties–in Fresno.  It’s like a highly curated events calendar with commentary.  If your taste matches The Fresnan’s (and if you’re in your 20s, it probably does), you’ll never lack for fun nights out in Fresno.  And with their content so firmly rooted in place, their StoryMap is quite useful and pretty.

Milwaukee Moments is devoted to “Fish Fries, Fashion, & Family”–an eclectic but lively mix of events, observations, and opinions all focused on Milwaukee.  Its author grew up in Milwaukee and then came back after 20 years.  She’s so happy to be back, she decided to write about it.  We’re glad she did.  Milwaukee Moments has a devoted audience and we’re excited to help it grow.

23
Jan 09

outside.in=The Center For Blogging Excellence

Posted by Jared in Tips & Tricks — View Comments

Kevin Talbot, author of No Sleep NYC, came by the outside.in HQ yesterday to pow-wow about local blogging.  No Sleep is an Astoria-based blog that recommends bars, coffee shops, restaurants, and events that have a local flair. It helps tourists find those places off the beaten path where they will no longer feel like tourists.  Kevin is fairly new to the blogosphere, but he went home yesterday totally motivated, and we’re really excited to see what he writes in the coming weeks.  Keep an eye on his site.

We talked about techniques to find material for good local posts and increase his audience. I encouraged him to write daily and to not underestimate what qualifies as news.  If he limits his geographic scope and writes about every restaurant opening, for instance, he’ll become a neighborhood authority in short order.  To increase his audience, I suggested he Twitter with lots of @replies and links to his posts, link to other area bloggers in his own blog posts, and, of course, I helped him put up a sweet StoryMap. Now his readers have an easy way to navigate his posts.  Also, his stories are being promoted on outside.in across outside.in/new_york_ny.

We also got all nerdy and dug into his GeoToolkit Stats.  They gave us a great idea of the places on which Kevin is the authority because no one else has written about them.  Now, he plans on staying on top of the news about those places so that readers come to his blog for updates.

Are you a local blogger that wants to pick up some tips?  Leave a comment to set up a visit to outside.in or to start an email thread.

22
Jan 09

StoryMap WordPress.org Plugin

Posted by Jared in Development & Features / Tips & Tricks — View Comments

For all of you bloggers using the WordPress.org platform, you can now get a StoryMap right in WordPress with our nifty new plugin.  With very clear directions, the plugin expedites the process of getting the StoryMap embed code on your blog.  Try it out and let us now what you think.

We’ve already started to get some great press on our StoryMap plugin.  For instance, BlogHighlight.com totally understands how to use it:

Those blogs that focus on news, travel and photography will get more exposure from this nice little plugin. The world can easily search their blog post by location.

Of course, we think StoryMaps are useful for a much wider variety of blogs, but we’re pleased to get the plug from BlogHighlight.

If you want to use our plugin on WordPress.com, email widgets@wordpress.com requesting that they accept the outside.in StoryMap widget.  In the email, be sure to include this link: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/outsidein-storymap/.

20
Jan 09

The News Tribune’s StoryMap

Posted by Jared in General — View Comments

The StoryMap to highlight from the weekend appeared on The News Tribune in Tacoma.  A local authority in Tacoma and the surrounding communities, The News Tribune is helping its readers find stories by geography, not just chronology or “importance.” They do a nice job of providing news directly related to specific towns with coverage from Auburn, WA to Yelm, WA.

We’re proud to join them in the effort to bring news that matters to their readers.

19
Jan 09

National Day of Service, Martin Luther King Jr. Day

Posted by Jared in Events — View Comments

Want to do your part in today’s National Day of Service?  Start a neighborhood news blog!

The first step toward effective community service is understanding and communicating the issues.  If nobody knows what’s going on, how can they get together to do anything about it?

So, let’s work together. You write the news, and we’ll get the word out.  Go to blogger.com or wordpress.com to start a free blog or typepad.com, if you want something more advanced.  Then, register your blog with GeoToolkit and outside.in will distribute your posts to your community.  We have a page for every town and city in the US. So, the stories you write will appear at outside.in/[your town]_[your state] and on our partners’ pages.

Not sure what to write about?  Here are 3 topics that every neighborhood, town, and city in America should cover.

  1. Local Government Meetings: If you live in America, then your town or neighborhood has some kind of democratic assembly, be it a Town Hall Meeting, a City Hall Meeting, or a Community Board Meeting.  Go to that meeting and write down what happens. Take minutes. What are the issues at stake?  Who’s on what side?  You may be very surprised to find out what’s happening right under your nose.
  2. Maintenance: Look out your window or take a walk around the neighborhood.  Notice anything in disrepair?  A playground with a broken slide?  A broken street light?  A missing manhole cover? Write about it. Get it fixed.
  3. Openings and Closings: Every time you notice a new business open or an old business close down, write about it.

You don’t need any qualifications to take on any of those assignments.

Still not convinced? Here’s a tip: limit your reach.  If you’re doing Maintenance, start with only your block. If it’s too easy, add 1 block at a time.  Don’t bite off more than you feel like chewing.  This should be easy, and even the smallest amount of information matters. Just think what would happen if everyone covered their own block.

Commit to writing 1 post today as your civic duty for the National Day of Service.  Let’s make sure that when the American people mobilize, they know exactly what needs to be done.

16
Jan 09

App-tly speaking

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

As you may have read in John’s post below, we released our awesome location-aware iPhone app this week, which gives you the ten most recent headlines within 1000 feet of your actual physical location (cool, right?!). Well, a few blogs took notice, as well.

Mashable: “…there’s an option available to iPhone owners looking to simplify the process and turn to a single source for the complete local picture: Radar, powered by outside.in is a brand new iPhone application that uses the devices’ GPS capabilities to locate you and display nearby news, blog posts, discussion threads, and tweets happening within 1,000 feet of your location.”

TG Daily: “…Enter Radar, a new iPhone application that taps outside.in‘s premium location-based news content to deliver relevant news and real time discussions based on your current city, neighborhood or within up to 1,000 feet of your current location. It is the Maps’ missing killer feature that greatly raises the standard for location-based applications you can find today at the App Store.”

GPSObsessed: “It’s a really handy app if you’re a media junkie, providing constant news and blog updates, Twitter tweets, Yelp reviews and other new content pertaining to your location.”

And! We’re pleased to report that we’ve just released some performance optimizations that will speed up our fab app’s response time. No update required if you’ve already downloaded the app–it’s all on our end. See for yourself! Download from the iTunes store and take it for a test drive yourself–but maybe not while driving…

If you already have it, how are you liking it so far? Have you made any great discoveries while out and about? Let us know in the comments!

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