Posts FromOctober, 2009

27
Oct 09

Welcome to the new Outside.in

Posted by lauren in Announcements — View Comments

Last Monday night around 7 p.m. we quietly launched a brand-new new site at Outside.in.

The new version of our site will help you you find out what’s happening wherever you are. Read on for the details of how you can use the new Outside.in to find the most relevant hyperlocal content quickly and easily—and for some information on what’s coming up next.

Search by Address, Neighborhood, City, or Place Name

homepage search screenshot

Our homepage now features a single search box that can tell you what’s happening wherever you are (in the U.S. of course!). This shiny new search engine intelligently combines a few types of searches we’ve offered for awhile (address, neighborhood, ZIP, and city search) and adds a new one (place search). Now we evaluate your query to determine what you’re searching for and show you different results based on your input.

You can search from the homepage for:

  • Address: Enter your exact address to get news stories and blog posts within 1,000 feet of you. For instance, searching for “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC” will show you what’s going on within 1,000 feet of the White House. This is the technology we formerly called “Radar,” but it’s now been integrated into our core experience so you can get radar results (now known as “Nearby News”) without going to a different section of our site.
  • Neighborhood, city, state, ZIP: You can also search for your neighborhood, city, state, or ZIP code to find all the news we’ve collected in the areas that matter to you. Check out examples of our news in Chinatown, Boston; Portland, OR; 90210; and all of Texas. Don’t mess with the biggest page on our site!
  • Place: The homepage search box can also get you to news about your favorite places, such as your alma mater (mine is Georgetown University), the park down the street from your office (ours is Brooklyn Bridge Park), or that book store that your West Coast friends claim is better than The Strand (Powell’s Books).

You can also search for regions, addresses, or places in the bottom search box of any internal page. You’ll notice that we’ve pre-filled that field with the name of the region you’re currently viewing (or the region that contains the place or address you’re currently viewing) but you can overwrite that default with the city, neigbhorhood, ZIP code, address, or place you want to search for next.

Keyword Search in Your Neighborhood

sidebar search box

Since I just mentioned that you should be doing your neighborhood, address, and place searches from the bottom box on internal pages, you may be wondering what you’re supposed to do with the top box. That’s for something totally new: keyword search within your neighborhood or city, at a place, or at any address!

We’ve always brought you news and stories at the most granular geographic level, now you can refine your search even further by searching for topics that interest you. Here are some examples:

Streamlined Site Design

We’ve also simplified the user experience on Outside.in significantly. Our new design is stripped of clutter and provides much clearer, more legible fonts—especially for page headers and news headlines. Compare the before and after of our Austin, TX page:

Austin Before

austin before

Austin After

austin after

This is just the first of many iterations of our new site design. We’ll be tracking the success of these new templates with a variety of engagement metrics to see what helps our users (that’s you!) find the most interesting content and content publishers (bloggers and news sites) get the most traffic. We aim to help you find a ton of content you care about, so you’ll see us testing lots of different templates and features.

RSS Feeds Galore

My favorite offering on our new site is the RSS feeds we’re generating for every page so you can take our news with you. We’ve always published feeds for city, neighborhood, ZIP, and topic pages, but now you can subscribe to news within 1,000 feet of any address; news about any place; or topic searches for your favorite region, address, or place.

rss link

You can find the RSS feeds in the toolbar of your browser, linked from the footer of any page, or by adding “.rss” to the end of any URL.

Just add the feed URL to your favorite feed reader (such as Google Reader, Bloglines, or News Gator), and you’ll automatically see new stories as we find them.

Proximity Matters

One of the most interesting challenges in hyperlocal is the mind-boggling number of regions and places with the same name. We’ve taken a first crack at tackling this issue on our new site, and are hoping for your feedback in improving our efforts.

st. petersburg disambiguation links

If your input to our homepage search box matches more than one region or place in the U.S., we’ll send you to the one closest to the city we detected from your IP address (don’t worry, we’re keeping your location top-secret at OI World HQ!) and show suggested links to other regions and places with the same name. For instance, looking for “St. Petersburg” from a New York IP address will take you to our region page for St. Petersburg, PA, but if you’re coming at us from an IP in Georgia we’ll take you to my hometown, St. Petersburg, FL, instead.

Either way, we’ll show you links underneath the page header that you can use to easily get to other matches if we didn’t guess the one you were looking for.

starbucks disambiguation links

The same goes for places! Searching for “Starbucks” from my Brooklyn IP address brings me to our news about the Starbucks in Park Slope, but if you did the same search from Seattle, we’d take you to a Starbucks in Broadway/Capitol Hill instead.

Naturally, giving us more information in the search box (specifying “St. Petersburg, FL” or “Starbucks, Broadway”) will take you directly to the region or place you had in mind.

Stronger, Faster Technology

Our CTO Andy Parsons will be posting later today on the new platform that’s powering all this goodness.

[update: Read all about our new infrastructure!]

What’s Next

Upcoming features to the site will be focused on providing you with the most targeted, personalized local information available. We want to vanquish information overload by helping you find only the most relevant content—and find it quickly. Ideas we’re brewing include ways to filter and sort our content and get alerts for the stories that matter most.

Feedback? Questions? Suggestions? We want to hear from you. Drop your thoughts in the comments or send us an email at contact@outside.in.

20
Oct 09

Blogger Community for All

Posted by chrysanthe in Announcements — View Comments

Hello bloggers! We’ve consolidated our individual blogger HQs into one destination site since we see a connection between all hyperlocal bloggers, regardless of the town, city, or places you write about. You may want to read our introductory post and watch the fun video we made to illustrate the blogger-publisher connection we’re facilitating as part of the new news ecosystem. Both should explain a bit about why we’ve created a destination site for you, the local bloggers that make up the backbone of the geoweb.

We’ll be laying out tips and tricks of hyperlocal blogging, and we’ll also be interviewing writers who have great local blogs (this means you! If you’re interested in being featured here, send us a note). We hope to be the common thread to link you together and connect you with ideas and other bloggers to help inspire you in your craft of writing about place.

Jump into the conversation in the comments on the new site and feel free to suggest your blog or other greats in your area–and make sure that your blog is included in our system to grow your audience and take advantage of our blogger tools!

Check it out! –> http://oibloggerHQ.outside.in

19
Oct 09

Hyperlocal Blogger Happy Hour in Chicago This Friday

Posted by chrysanthe in Announcements / Events — View Comments

Come on down to the Clark Street Ale House this Friday, October 23, at 6pm for drinks with your fellow local bloggers. Outside.in’s Director of Partner Relations Jared Ranere will be your host, so you can pick his brain on everything hyperlocal and ask questions about outside.in and Geotoolkit—and the first round is on us! Feel free to blog about this or share the invite with any hyperlocal bloggers you know in the Chicago area.

Please RSVP. We’ll randomly select a blogger from the RSVP list to win a fun outside.in prize. Hope to see you there!

12
Oct 09

Outside.in: 2 Minute Version

Posted by mark in General — View Comments

Last week I was asked to give a brief overview of Outside.in at the New York City Investment Fund annual meeting.  Those of you who know me know I love to talk about our business.  But, this time, I only had two minutes.  It proved to be a great exercise in boiling down all of what’s happening in local and what we are trying to do.

So, thought I’d share here on the blog.  Here’s the full text.  I stayed pretty close to it.

Start your stopwatches…..now:

Good evening. I’m Mark Josephson, CEO of Outside.in.

We are a team of 18 people based in Brooklyn focused on revolutionizing local media.

There are a few key trends that are reshaping the local media ecosystem that we think are worth noting.

The first trend is:

An Explosion in the Amount of Local Content Created

Local content used to just be an article written by a newspaper. Today it includes that newspaper article, but also one by a hyperlocal blogger about their neighborhood news. It includes someone adding a star on a Yelp restaurant review, Tweeting about a concert or event, or someone taking a picture with their cell phone of a plane landing in the Hudson River. You can now cover specific neighborhoods, or hyperlocal places and events like never before.

Today, everyone is a publisher.

The second important trend is:

The Cost of Sales for Local Advertising is Dropping

There was $115 billion spent on local advertising last year. Only $15 billion of that was spent on the internet. But that number is changing fast. Dollars are being driven to the internet as circulation and effectiveness of newspapers and yellow page directories drop and advertisers embrace the transparency and results-based pricing of internet advertising.

This is leading to the third trend:

Local Advertisers are Streaming Online for Customers

So, what do we do at the Outside.in world headquarters in Brooklyn to create value in this incredibly dynamic market?

Simply, we use proprietary technology to aggregate all of the web’s local content and advertising, and we organize it all into more than 50,000 neighborhoods across the country and we put it in front of the right person at the right time, and we get paid every time we do it.

We do this in partnership with more than 5,000 sites across the web in every market in the country and on our own website at outside.in.

For example, we recently announced a partnership with The New York Post.  Before working with Outside.in, NYPost.com had one page of news for each borough. Today, they leverage our data and tools to power pages for more than 170 targeted neighborhoods.

In the past year our audience has grown from several hundred thousand people per month to nearly 6MM today. And we’re just getting started.

We think there is no better partner than NYCIF and no better place to be building this business and our team than in New York City, the media capital of the world.

Thank you.

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