• Get stories within 1,000 feet of any lat/lng in the U.S.
• Make a map of hyperlocal stories by limiting your results to stories attached to places and requesting location metadata for every item we return.
• Paginate through additional results for your query.

And more! Read all about it on our developer blog and be sure to follow @outsideinAPI on Twitter for updates on our API.

Lauren will be talking about our API as a case study for  how APIs can power relationships between large and small companies (take Outside.in and CNN, for example). Though we’re probably a bit biased, we think that sounds really interesting, and we can’t wait to hear Lauren’s take on things.

The rest of the speakers at the conference sound similarly compelling:

• Ty Ahmad-Taylor, Founder, FanFeedr
• Danny Boice, Executive Director, Web Technology/New Media, The College Board
• Tim Carlson, Manager, Digital Platforms, USA Today
• Matthieu Houle, Director Mobile and Platform, Yellow Pages Group
• Chuck Hudson, Founder, Aduci and Control UI
• Marc Parrish, VP of Direct Marketing, Barnes & Noble
• Jason Purdy, Technical Program Manager, Associated Press
• Matt Raines, VP of Technology, Bluefly
• Benjamin Schmaus, Software Engineering Manager, Comcast Interactive Media
• Patrick Stokes, Vice President, Engineering, Buddy Media
• Jeremy Thomas, Director of Product Development, Active.com
• Oren Michels, Co-Founder and CEO, Mashery
• Quentin Hardy, National Editor, Forbes Magazine

Interested in attending? Tickets are still available through the conference site. The conference will be followed by a cocktail hour at 6 P.M. and sounds like an incredibly interesting event for developers and others interested in the business of APIs.

Lauren Sperber, Sr. Product Manager, Outside.In

As Outside.in’s first product manager, Lauren introduced order and documentation to the company’s small, scrappy development team. She moved on to head up product management of Outside.in’s hyperlocal search and syndication platform, including the newly released API, which enables developers to access local news in any U.S. state, city, ZIP code, or neighborhood. Before Outside.in, Lauren worked in product development and marketing in the education and non-profit sectors. She studied literature at Georgetown University and NYU, where she wrote her MA thesis on how search engines construct the authoritativeness of online text.

What can the API do? Quite a bit. Publishers can build and design mobile apps to custom web experiences by tapping into our massive database of more than 54,000 sources from local bloggers, journalists and mainstream sources for any neighborhood, city, state, and ZIP in the U.S. API users can filter the results by various parameters such as date, number of stories, source attributes (e.g., vertical/category, format, author type), and keywords. A few ideas:

• Take local to the next level by bundling the right source of neighborhood news targeted at specific demographics like moms, foodies, or college students
• Add dimension to existing personalization experiences by empowering readers to find and save news for neighborhoods they care about

What clever ideas do you have?  Get going and introduce the API to your developers: send them to check out the documentation on our API portal where they can get an API key to start playing around.

What are the benefits?

• User Engagement & Advertising Opportunities: The API opens the door to tons of local content that publishers can slice and dice to fit their editorial and user needs, all of which create robust streams of targeted advertising inventory.
• Reliability and Speed: Outside.in provides a proven hyperlocal platform that meets the scale and performance needs of some of web’s biggest publishers such as CNN, Tribune, The New York Post, and MediaGeneral (with more to announce in the near future). In fact, we first previewed the API earlier this year to power the local news on CNN.com and the CNN iPhone app.
• Hyperlocal Expertise and Support: With so many possibilities to explore, our Partner Relations team is available and happy to help publishers vet ideas and provide the necessary guidance and support along the way.

How do I get started?

1.     Check out the details here and introduce your developers to the API. Have them sign up for a dev key to see what the API is capable of and take it for a test spin.

2.     Give us a shout via email to discuss any of the following:

• Terms for a commercial relationship. (Note that the API is free for non-commercial use up to 5,000 queries per day.)
• Enable curation on API implementations via the Outside.in Hyperlocal Publisher Dashboard.
• Transition to an API-powered experience. (If you are an existing Outside.in for Publishers partner, we can generate a separate key for you to ensure that the API inherits your curation settings from the Publisher Dashboard.)

There is a lot to take advantage of, so start building your own unique hyperlocal experience today!  We can’t wait to see what you will create!

*P.S. Follow @outsideinAPI for the latest scoop on the API.

We gave a sneak peek of the API at texting.ly‘s Geo/Mobile Hack Day this weekend, alongside other geo-tech startups in NYC, including foursquare, Meetup, and SimpleGeo (slides here).

Here’s how it works:

Search for Stories

Send the name of any U.S. neighborhood, ZIP code, city, or state to our Stories Query Resource to get information about the region (including geographic centerpoint and containing region), plus the most recent stories we’ve associated with that region.

You can filter the stories returned by:

• keyword: search within the titles, summaries, and topic tags associated with each story
• timestamp: limit your results to stories of a specified age
• feed category: our three-part source taxonomy allows you to specify the feeds you’d like to receive stories from by any or all of the following:
  • vertical: this includes topics like news, crime, and politics
  • format: this distinguishes by feeds that publish blog posts, traditional news articles, reviews, etc.
  • author type: this allows you to select stories published by mainstream media outlets, unaffiliated individual bloggers, sharing sites with multiple authors, etc.

Search for Locations

If you’re building an application that requires user input to identify a location, you can use our Locations Query Resource to find locations matching any string. The location metadata returned includes a unique identifier that can be used to lookup stories for any matching location.

Get Your Key!

Visit developers.outside.in to check out our documentation and register for a key—you’ll be approved immediately.

We can’t wait to see what you come up with! Send an email to lauren {at} outside {dot} in to get your app featured in our Application Gallery.

Stay in Touch

Follow @outsideinAPI to learn about future API releases and interesting apps built with our API.

We’ve got great news for hyperlocal news lovers and social media addicts! You can now follow headlines from your ZIP code on Twitter, thanks to our friends at TwitZip. TwitZip is a great example of how our geographically organized news platform can be leveraged to create a fantastic new tool to help people stay in touch with what’s happening in their communities. After registering Twitter handles for nearly ever U.S. ZIP code, TwitZIP used our hyperlocal data to tweet out the news for every ZIP. Their handles also send out local deals from Groupon every day.

To see hyperlocal news and deals in your Twitter stream, just go to twitter.com/{your ZIP} and click follow. I’m following my home ZIP at http://twitter.com/11217.

Our favorite TwitZip feature enables citizen reporting via @ reply. Just @ any ZIP handle with breaking news or events and include the hashtag #twitzip to be retweeted by that ZIP.

To learn more about how TwitZip got started, check out this nice article in Silicon Prarie.

We’re looking forward to hearing what you think of this new medium for Outside.in headlines—let us know in the comments!

If you’ve registered with Outside.in and you haven’t yet seen your stories appearing on CNN.com (or Outside.in, for that matter), there are a couple things you can do to help your posts appear (but keep in mind CNN always has the last word on which headlines show up on their site):

We’re happy to see so many bloggers getting the spotlight they deserve. Here are a few examples I spotted on CNN.com on a recent morning:

Here’s an example from CNN’s U.S. News page as well:

It is really awesome to see these titans of local media build their neighborhood pages with our tools for aggregation and curation. It goes a long way to helping fulfill the promise of the new local media ecosystem. Big publishers need to get to a neighborhood level to satisfy their readers and advertisers and local bloggers need more traffic and visibility. Our tools bring them all together to their mutual benefit.

We’re glad these leading sites think we’re the best choice and we’ll continue to build and improve our services so everyone wins.
——-
MORE PUBLISHERS TEAM WITH OUTSIDE.IN FOR HYPERLOCAL CONTENT

News Organizations Across the Country are Adding Real-time Neighborhood News to their Sites

NEW YORK, NY (February 8, 2010) – In the past 7 months, hyperlocal content and advertising platform Outside.in has formed partnerships with some of the country’s most well-known publishers, including The Miami Herald, Dow Jones Local Media Group, New York Post, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and properties of the Tribune Company, including Chicago Tribune, Chicago Breaking News, ChicagoNow, and the Baltimore Sun.

Outside.in launched its publisher offering, Outside.in for Publishers (OIP), in June 2009 to create targeted Neighborhood News Pages for every city, town and neighborhood in a publisher’s market. Publishers using the OIP platform can create customized and curated hyperlocal news sections, add tagged news maps, and curate the aggregated news feeds to fit their editorial guidelines.

As a result, Outside.in has extended its reach to more than 100 publishers, providing consumers, publishers and bloggers the tools needed to make neighborhood news and information easily accessible and widely available.

“People have a deep interest in the news and events that are happening in their immediate neighborhoods,” said Camilla Cho, Vice President of Business Development of Outside.in. “But the ability to create, find, organize and distribute local content has historically been a struggle for many media companies. As the media landscape continues to change, more and more publishers are seeing the value in hyperlocal content, and Outside.in provides a source of flexibility, transparency and control to get hyperlocal easily and efficiently.”

In addition to growing its network of publisher partnerships, Outside.in has added 4,000 local bloggers to its roster and has seen traffic increased to more than seven million monthly unique visitors on the Outside.in Network. Outside.in currently services 57,830 neighborhoods, aggregates and organizes over 40,000 unique feeds, and provides neighborhood information to over 100 news websites.

About Outside.in
Outside.in is the leading hyperlocal content and advertising platform. Outside.in monitors all the news, blogs and discussions on the web and dynamically maps them to more than 57,000 neighborhoods in the U.S.

Through the Outside.in for Publishers platform, publishers create customized and curated hyperlocal news sections to offer highly localized content on their sites. Bloggers can distribute their content with the Outside.in Network to build traffic and attract new users to their blogs. Advertisers are able to take advantage of quality local advertising inventory.

Outside.in is supported by leading investors including Union Square Ventures, Village Ventures, Betaworks, the New York City Investment Fund, Milestone Venture Partners and CNN Worldwide. For more information, visit http://outside.in, the company’s blog or follow us on Twitter.

Software development in a technology startup is a constant juggling act. One aspect you can always count on is the need to balance infrastructure/scaling work with development of new features and evolution of old ones.  We have key initiatives on all of these fronts going on right now.

Keeping infrastructure humming under loads that increase week over week as our user base grows is ideally what I call a “dollar solvable” problem, meaning we simply bring up some additional machines, watch work distribution kick in, and get back to our software engineering work. The reality is that in any large system, bottlenecks and hotspots develop such that adding hardware incrementally is not always effective, and at those junctures code is refactored or replaced. In both cases, it is critical to have a computing environment that is as agile as possible; it must be simple and cheap to bring new machines into clusters, even simpler to remove them, and trivial to spin up small networks and environments for testing and experimentation. To achieve this, we have moved to a “cloud” environment for much of our live product presence. About 2 weeks ago, on a calm sunny Sunday in New York, we seamlessly migrated from a fixed data center model for hosting to a very flexible virtual environment. By the end of that afternoon we officially flipped the switch and watched our traffic migrate to the new network, and we haven’t looked back.  Virtual hosting isn’t a panacea, and it is certainly no substitute for good architecture. But it does make many of the tasks around managing growth inexpensive and much faster.

Architecture is a daily focus. I’ll detail some of the innovations we’re making in subsequent posts, but the summary is we’re constructing new data models to account for curation of content. Data structures can generally be made fast for data capture or retrieval, but not for both simultaneously. We have some techniques in mind for optimizing the user experience for our partners and readers of content aggregated with our platform. It is a data design and transformation problem, and with our cloud environment we will be benchmarking and honing our approach. The goal is fast, responsive UI for all of our products built on top of an engine that maximizes throughput for very fast processing and publishing of news and local information. I think we have it all figured out, and you’ll be able to grade us in short order.

And this brings us to the salient point for you, our user. The product that brings the aggregation/curation/networks vision to the forefront of what we do is in active development, and it will be announced very soon. “Very soon” means the engineering and product teams are gunning for an aggressive release date, and the tone in the office shows that to be the case; average caffeine intake is on the rise and the whiteboards are full. The release will feature our best work on all fronts, and that work will also raise the bar for the central Outside.in website, our iPhone application, the Geo Toolkit (which just got a slick facelift), and our partner offerings.

Lastly in this installment, I want to applaud OI co-founder and VP of Engineering Cory Forsyth who is off to the sold-out Scotland on Rails conference at the end of this month. Cory is presenting a talk on image processing in Ruby (read more here). Outside.in has become a fixture in the NYC Ruby community, fueled by our monthly Ruby Happy Hour meetups and events like Cory’s talks. Look for more from us in the Ruby and Open Source realms in the coming months.

Now, back to the juggling act! I’ll post again soon.

We’ve spruced up GeoToolkit to make it super-fast and easy to get a StoryMap for your blog! Our changes have streamlined the process of signing up for GeoToolkit and grabbing a StoryMap and clarified the connection between the pins on a StoryMap and the geotagging done in our feed editor.

How did we get here? In November, we brought three New York bloggers in to do usability testing on the process of signing up for StoryMaps: Natalie of Little Miss Moonshine, Evan of The King is Naked, and Shawn of The Hatter’s Rant. None of these bloggers were familiar with outside.in or StoryMaps, so we showed them the lovely map on Gotham Gal‘s blog and asked them to try to get one for their own site, recording their actions with Silverback and watching to see where the process could be improved.

The most exciting revelation was the disconnect all testers felt between the StoryMap and our feed editor. Since all three of these bloggers only write about place occasionally, none of them had pins on their StoryMaps and didn’t know they needed to go to the feed editor to add places to their stories. Their reactions and feedback were invaluable to our improvements to the signup process and interface for getting a StoryMap.

Many of you already familiar with StoryMaps have asked us for options to map breaking news or go deeper into your archives. Well, guess what! We listened. We’ve added two new default timespan options: one day and one year. If you already have a map, the new timespan options have appeared automatically. How’s that for science? If you don’t have a map, go to outside.in/geotoolkit, register your site, pick the time frame and the size of your map, click update, and voila!

Wondering how to ensure pins will be on your map? First, write about places, mention them by name, and publish a full text RSS feed. (For more on full text RSS, see this post.) Second, take control of your geotagging with our vastly improved feed editor. Under the “Place Your Stories” tab, you can add places, neighborhoods, towns, and cities to your posts and bring in stories that have been skipped. We’ve solved the mystery behind “this story has been deleted since it was originally accepted” message, so your posts will no longer be accidentally deleted. The whole system is faster and more stable. With it’s new reliability, you have all the more reason to use this great tool!

GeoToolkit and StoryMaps are better than ever, easier to use, and free. So, go get a map for your blog.

Last night while you were watching the Superbowl, we released the updated version of our iPhone app.

This version speeds up performance and eliminates timeout errors and crashes. We’ve also tweaked the interface for adding locations: Now tapping any location in your address list takes you directly to news around that address. How cool is that?

If you’ve already bought it, get the updated version for free in the App Store on your iPhone. If you haven’t, what are you waiting for? Download it now for news within 1,000 feet of any location!