Today we launch StoryMaps, the next offering in our GeoToolkit—products to help publishers promote, optimize and monetize their local content.
Our goal is to leverage location data and the geoweb to help local publishers reach a larger audience and our StoryMaps are the first of many products designed to do that.
Local publishers write about places and things happening within a specific geography and readers live their lives the same way — “What’s going on around me?”
Until now, bloggers only had the option of displaying their stories on a chronological basis, with feeds that showed just the most recent posts and pushed the rest off the page and into oblivion. If a local blogger wrote about a great new restaurant or about a recent town meeting and some readers didn’t visit the site that day, that post was gone and the blogger had missed the opportunity to reach those readers.
But its not just about letting readers see content that is more than a day old. It’s about letting users view content in a way that makes sense to them – organized around the places each post is written about. So they not only see a current post about that place, but links to all previous posts about that location as well. That translates to a better, more full reading experience for them — and to more pageviews for the blogger.
Now, with Outside.in’s StoryMaps, they can promote their content by geography and places — and use a permanent promotion and navigation element that matches how their local readers live and want to explore content.
Placing a StoryMap on your site will drive more pageviews; and that’s what we’re trying to do.
You can see some great examples of local sites using StoryMaps to promote their content here:
How it Works
These StoryMaps are found in GeoToolkit under the “Tools” tab. Until now, GeoToolkit members could see and edit the place data our geotagging engine finds in their content in the “Feed” tab of GeoToolkit. They could also see the geoanalytics — the stats on places, neighborhoods and connections — in the “Stats” tab.
GeoToolkit members can now easily grab code and put a map on their page that shows where their stories are in their neighborhood.
These interactive StoryMaps highlight each post and aggregates the content around the places they are writing about. They can be adjusted to look deeper into the archives as well.
So, come grab the code and try out a StoryMap on your site. Please give us feedback on what you like and what you’d like to see in future updates and products.
Mark
