Posts Tagged "iphone"

29
Jun 10

Bloggers We Love: Jill Harrison

Posted by Esther Brown in Bloggers We Love / General / Tips & Tricks — View Comments

BLOGGER: Jill Harrison

FEATURED BLOG(S): For the Love of Brooklyn

TWITTER: @LoveofBrooklyn

FACEBOOK: For the Love of Brooklyn

FLICKR: For the Love of Brooklyn

One thing I’ve learned by conducting our ‘Bloggers We Love,’ interviews is that a hyperlocal blog can be a powerful platform for community organizing – and not just in the political sense. What a hyperlocal or local blog can do especially well (better than a blog that’s not locally-oriented, in many cases) is create communities both online AND offline.

One blogger who is building a vibrant community of like-minded individuals via her blog is Jill Harrison of the inspirational photoblog For the Love of Brooklyn. Not only is For the Love of Brooklyn a great local photoblog chronicling the entire New York City borough of Brooklyn, it’s a collective, meaning the photographs showcased on the site are not just taken by Harrison and the seven other original organizers of the blog, but they’re submitted by an entire community of photographers, both professionals and amateurs alike. Submissions are then curated into photo essays by Harrison and her editorial team.

We could all learn a lot about community building from this collective of artists and enthusiasts who share the same subject: Brooklyn, in all its varied incarnations. With that in mind, I am pleased to present:

10 Ways to Build Community as a Hyperlocal Blogger

(or, what I learned from For the Love of Brooklyn)


10. Enroll Others

“About a year ago I realized that I had a lot of photographer friends and I basically polled some of my friends and asked if they were interested in starting [a blog for] more or less a collective of photographers [which is how For the Love of Brooklyn started.]“

9. Start Your Own Meetup

“In January, we started holding monthly Meetups. We go out into Brooklyn neighborhoods with our cameras and explore them – and invite whoever is interested into the group to come exploring with us. For instance, we went to Gowanus, right after the Gowanus [Canal] was declared a Superfund site – more than 35 people walked through Gowanus shooting [photographs]. It was great because I got to meet all these people that I correspond with on the internet.”

8. Reconsider Your ‘Target’ Audience

“[Our Meetups aren't just for photographers]. Several amateur historians come along and narrate [our exploratory forays into Brooklyn neighborhoods]. That’s one of my favorite parts about our Meetups – all kinds of people come along – from longtime Brooklyn residents to tourists from Europe who are just curious.”

7. Embrace Flickr

An example of iPhone photography using the Hipstamatic App - 'Coney Island Moon' by CootieGarage, a member of For The Love of Brooklyn's Flickr Pool

“Flickr – that was my gateway drug [to social media]. If you submit to our Flickr pool, your work could get featured [on For the Love of Brooklyn]. I always do a lot of due diligence, but overall the feedback has been really positive. People are totally PUMPED to have their work featured. Even with professional photographers I’ve had really good results. I’ve been really inspired by [the way the blog has shown me] how the old ways of thinking about art — ‘it’s MY intellectual property, it’s MY work,’ – are changing. You have to be very aware that this social networking creates ties instead of boundaries. People want their work re-blogged. Artistic boundaries are changing, and they seem to be changing really rapidly.”

6. Get Out There (Yes, You)!

“I’ve been trying to personally attend more events this year – more networking events and more events that interest me, personally – just to meet people who are doing similar things. We have quite a few photographers who have had gallery openings as well – so when we visit gallery openings we’re evangelizing the blog: a little word of mouth [marketing].”

5. Organize Events to Celebrate & Promote Your Community Members

“Yes! [We are] definitely [going to organize a show]. Last fall we had several photographers exhibit in the the D.U.M.B.O. Art Under the Bridge Festival. We’re also hoping to do some limited run installations – hopefully some of them in my new house [that I just brought in Crown Heights]!”

4. Delegate Responsibility to Community Members

“I often ask people for submissions – it’s a great way to build both leadership and a follower base [on a collaborative blog]. It’s a great way to do things – I’ve literally never had anybody say ‘No.’”

3. Take the Time to Learn About & Spotlight Your Community Members

“I do interviews with the photographers we feature [on For the Love of Brooklyn]. Some of my favorites are the ones I did with with Brooklyn photographers Claire Voelkel and Lyouba Assadourova. Another favorite was with my good friend Anna Gordon from The Good Batch at the Brooklyn Flea – she turned her hobby into a fairly booming business. It’s really turned into a this big thing, built by sheer hard work and by the support she’s gotten from the Brooklyn community.”

2. Teach & Learn

“A lot of teaching and learning occurs informally at our Meetups. We don’t have any formal lessons or Master Classes at the moment, but that’s something that I think is missing from Brooklyn. I’d love to organize volunteer-based art instruction. Someday!”

1. Be Open to the Ways Your Blog & Its Community Will Change YOU

“I get inspired by other people and hopefully I can inspire other people with what I’m doing, too. For instance, [because of the need to create content for the blog, I have to] constantly challenge myself to get out with my camera to create photo essays. Also, through these interviews I’m conducting and [my increased] exposure to other artists in the borough, I’ve refined my perspective about photography and how I propose the genre. Over the last 6 months I’ve actually almost fully become a film photographer – it forces me to identify my perspective before I shoot – and because I’m more careful about how I’m shooting, when I’m creating photo essays I have a tighter narrative.”

P. S. More examples of lo-fi photography using the iPhone are here! You can also see an example of higher-end photography using a medium-format film (Hasselblad) here, or high-end digital Nikon gear here.
P.P.S. Local bloggers, don’t forget to register your blog here. It’s quick, simple, and will help drive traffic to your blog.
P.P. S.: If you’d like to be featured in our ‘Bloggers We Love’ series (or you’d like to nominate your favorite local blogger(s) for inclusion), we’d love to hear from you! Simply send an email to esther@outside.in

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2
Feb 09

outside.in iPhone App: Now Better than Ever!

Posted by lauren in Announcements / Development & Features — View Comments

outside.in iphone app location view

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!

13
Jan 09

Outside.in’s Radar Now Available as iPhone App

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

Since the very beginning of time, people have walked around thinking to themselves, “I wonder what’s going on around me right now?”

It is a basic human instinct to want up-to-the-minute information on your immediate surroundings. And this desire has always gone unmet by commonly available media and communications systems.

But no more.

Today, Outside.in launches its new Radar app for the iPhone. The app, now available in the iTunes Store, tells you what’s going on right around you, delivering the most recent headlines from newspapers, blogs, twitter, yelp and more about places nearby.

Load Radar for iPhone up, and it immediately gives you the ten most recent headlines within 1000 feet of your current location. Click through those headlines and you instantly get a snippet of those stories to see what they’re about. Click through again, and you get the full story, from the original site.

Or bump Radar out a notch, and you can read all of the most recent stories from the web about the neighborhood you happen to be in at the moment.

Bump it out one more level, and Radar shows you the most recent stories from the entire city around you.

Radar on the iPhone presents a whole new way of engaging news and information online. The experience becomes not so much one of browsing the web, as much as browsing the world directly around you. Wherever you go, you gain access to the information on the web about that specific area. And that information is likely to be relevant, or at least interesting, by virtue of the fact that it is about stuff that is happening literally right next to you.

The iPhone Radar app is another step in Outside.in’s quest to bring location to the web, and the web to location. We think it’s a pretty exciting one. Give it a try and tell us what you think.

3
Sep 08

Locly App Features Outside.in

Posted by Nina in General — View Comments

Over the past two years, we’ve compiled a rather large database of local expertise: millions of stories and discussion posts collected from thousands of feeds, and growing. We figured its about time to share this pile of content. As a precursor to our upcoming API, we’ve teamed up with several developers looking to integrate hyperlocal content into their own apps.

Locly, an iPhone app that shows useful info based on your GPS location,  was first to start using the Outside.in data. Locly also displays info from Wikipedia articles, nearby Flickr images, Twitters tweets, and local events from eventful.

You can find and download Locly from the iPhone App Store. It’s free.

How does Locly pull in Outside.in news you ask?

All of Outside.in’s City, Neighborhood, and Place pages broadcast an RSS feed, making it very simple for a blog, a news site, or any application to bring our data into its platform.  For now, if you subscribe to our feed, it’s up to you to customize the presentation, adjust it to best suit your site or application, and if you would be so kind, contact us.

Also, we’re working on opening up an API to let developers build with our data, so if you have any ideas, thoughts or comments, please leave them below.

Are you currently working on a phone app? Tell us about it.

29
Jun 07

Outside.in Finally Goes Outside

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

Today we’re rolling out two new extensions of outside.in: a neighborhood news widget and a special streamlined version of outside.in customized for the iPhone. The widget is dead simple to configure: visit this page, and enter your zip code along with any specific topic you want to focus on, and you’ll see a preview of how the widget will look on your blog. Once you’ve got a configuration that works well for you, just cut and paste the javascript into your blog sidebar and you’re ready to go.

The iPhone app (which should work on most mobile devices that have a browser) is a variation on the same theme: select a zip code or a city, filter by topic if you choose, and you’ll see a quick overview of the latest news and conversation from that area.

It’s a simple application, and we’re going to be enhancing it in the next few weeks (once we get our hands on an iPhone!), but even now we think it does something that up to now was impossible to do on a mobile device. Yes, there are a number of services out there that let you search for nearby restaurants or bars from a mobile phone. But what if you’re looking for something less specific than that? What if you’re visiting a new neighborhood and you want to know what the latest buzz is in that community — what the locals are obsessing about? You can get a list of Chinese restaurants, but it’s almost impossible to get a feel for a new place without going up and talking to strangers and learning about the place via word-of-mouth.

Now, we’re all for talking to strangers (at least some of the time), but we think outside.in on a mobile device is a great way of extending that kind of conversation. Type in a zip code and you can instantly get a read on what the neighborhood has been buzzing about. And maybe then when you do strike up that conversation with a local, you’ll have something to talk about.

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