Posts Tagged "News"

8
Dec 10

Video & Slides from Our Presentation at Mashery’s Business of APIs Conference

Posted by lauren in CNN / Industry Notes & Commentary — View Comments

This October I gave a presentation at Mashery‘s Business of APIs conference, speaking about how our API provides hyperlocal headlines on CNN.com as a case study for how APIs can power business relationships between tiny startups and multinational corporations.

The video and slides from the conference are up, so you can check them out:

Video

Slides


For those of you who need a summary version, I think @Mashery captured my main point nicely:

L. Sperber from Outside.in says APIs remove friction from a business relationship.

Interested in using our API? Check out our documentation at developers.outside.in—and the sweet sample code posted last week by our lead API developer Brian Moseley.

8
Nov 10

Outside.in is Hiring: Content Manager

Posted by Jared in Jobs — View Comments

Outside.in is the leading provider of hyperlocal news and information. We show consumers neighborhood news and information from local bloggers and mainstream media on hundreds of trusted news sites across the Outside.in Network as well as on our destination site, Outside.in.

ROLE:
Content is an essential component of our hyperlocal experience. We’re looking for an analytical and creative Content Manager to lead the organization, refinement, and expansion of our database of more than 50,000 content sources. By doing so, you will be playing a critical role in Outside.in’s success.

Reporting to the VP of Partner Relations, the Content Manager will be responsible for:

  • Ensuring that our content source database covers all U.S. markets comprehensively
  • Monitoring various channels for new sources of hyperlocal content and adding them to our database as they become available
  • Maintaining titles, categorizations, and other data points of content sources to ensure high-quality results across the Outside.in Network
  • Continuously refining the taxonomy by which we organize our content sources to accommodate new types of content
  • Managing a team of remote freelancers and reviewing their work for inclusion in our content database
  • Using mechanical turk to efficiently outsource large-scale tasks
  • Supporting content needs of key partners based on needs shared by the business development and partner relations teams
  • Monitoring trending news topics and ensuring that our content tagging is optimized for search queries for those stories
  • Assisting the product team in researching roadmap for inclusion of new content sources and the QA team in testing the release of new content-related features
  • Monitoring key metrics for diversity and quality of content database and focusing work to optimize those metrics
  • Regularly monitor and be a passionate advocate for the quality of our content

REQUIREMENTS:

  • Highly analytical, detail-oriented, and driven worker comfortable working in a demanding, fast-paced environment
  • Experience using Excel to organize and manipulate large sets of data
  • Ability to orchestrate systems to manage many simultaneous, ongoing tasks with a knack for finding an easier way
  • 1-2 years of experience in an analytical position or an online editorial position

ICING ON THE CAKE:

  • Passion for news and local content
  • Experience with or interest in learning to use Mechanical Turk
  • Familiarity with SQL

INTERESTED?
Please send cover letter, resume and/or LinkedIn profile to careers@outside.in

10
Jun 10

The Semantic Web & Tomorrow’s News Business

Posted by lauren in General / Industry Notes & Commentary — View Comments

We’re loving this short documentary on the semantic web by Kate Ray—and especially this quote from the ever-so-insightful Clay Shirky:

If I was going to start a news business tomorrow, I would start a news business designed to produce not one new bit of news, but instead to aggregate news for individuals in ways that matter to them.

1
Dec 09

Grants Spur More New Media Ventures… Will They Survive?

Posted by camilla in General / Industry Notes & Commentary — View Comments

moniesIt feels like almost every week I read about a new media venture sprouting up thanks to grant money from xyz foundation or donors. NPR recently received a $3MM grant from the Corporation for Publication Broadcasting and the Knight Foundation to fund bloggers and curators in 12 cities. There is a long list of recipients that are embarking on online local news ventures, including:

The most recent news comes out of Chicago where a dozen groups have received a total of $500,000 in grant from the Community News Matters program. The list of recipients struck me, not because of WHO they are, but HOW they are planning on using the funds. Many organizations will use the tens of thousands of dollars to cover news in specific neighborhoods and hire/engage bloggers and citizen journalists.

A boost of cash is great but what happens after it’s all spent? Apply for more grant money or is there a viable business model to keep it running? How that initial source of start-up funding will be spent is key. It’d be a shame to hire a bunch of bloggers and curators and then lose them when the money runs out. It’d be disappointing to see the launch of a hyperlocal news site with great community information that can’t update the data on a regular basis when the funds run dry.

I am all for financial support, especially for these types of new media ventures, but the opportunities that the grants provide for need to be seized in a right way that is strategic and sustainable. With the generosity and good will of many of these foundation and donors, combined with the passion and entrepreneurship of these upstarts, we at Outside.in see this as a great opportunity to work with the ventures to help build and execute on an efficient and viable business model. Assuming that these grant recipients are in it for the long haul, we have ideas, products, and tools to help them meet their short-term and long-term goals.

16
Sep 09

Google Fast Flip Misses the Point

Posted by lauren in Industry Notes & Commentary — View Comments

fast flip logo

Tech blogs were buzzing yesterday about Google Fast Flip.

The new experimental service allows users to flip through screenshots of web articles from “three dozen top publishers,” according to the announcement on The Official Google Blog. You can choose to sift through latest articles or specify a vertical or source publication—typical filtering mechanisms also available in the more traditional interface of Google News.

Fast Flip aims to speed up news consumption by eliminating the need for end users to load an entire page (including the publisher’s template, navigation, ads, and analytics tags) to read an article.

To make up for showing more than the accepted fair use summary of articles, Google will share an undisclosed percentage of revenue on the ads shown next to the screenshots.

fast flip section thumbnails

The product concept is interesting, but its execution misses the mark in two major ways:

Aggregation

As a high-touch opt-in service for publishers, Fast Flip faces an uphill battle to gain breadth and diversity of source articles. Its baseline content providers show a heavy bias toward major national and international media companies.

Under this model, users never see content from small hyperlocal or niche vertical publishers who may have innovative coverage in their area of expertise. And smaller publishers can’t easily opt-in through a form on the Fast Flip site—presumably they must contact Google via email and prove reach or name recognition to warrant the time Google would spend setting up a rev share deal and what seem to be screenshots at a custom size for each publisher (screenshots for Salon.com are 995px wide, whereas those for Fast Company are 640px wide and those for BBC are 655px wide).

fast flip section thumbnails

Improving the UX of News Consumption

Does Fast Flip fulfill its lofty goal of saving users from the sometimes-painful load times of media sites?

microfiche reader by Mosman Library on Flickr

New microfiche/film reader by Mosman Library on Flickr

The product claims to bring the experience of reading a magazine online, but the interface more closely resembles that of a microfiche machine (hat tip to Outiside.in Biz Dev VP Camilla Cho for the observation) and provides neither the physical immediacy of print nor standard web conventions to guide users through content.

By sticking screenshots of articles into a bulky wrapper, Google breaks the page layout and UI choices of each original site design. By centering publishers’ templates within the Fast Flip interface, Fast Flip often pushes the content out of prime locations where we’re used to focusing our eyes.

The screenshots also kill accessibility and interactivity. Without HTML, no one can click on links within the article, play embedded video, or enlarge photos. Users with screen readers are hosed and the weak of sight can’t use their browser settings to resize fonts.

For all those normal features of web browsing, you have to visit the original article, complete with long download time and a jarring experience of adjusting from the Fast Flip-wrapped screenshot to the original site.

We love to see innovative interfaces for news consumption, but this one doesn’t seem up to snuff. Publishers, what do you think? Is Fast Flip the kind of interface you’d like to see your readers using?

17
Dec 08

Outside.in API Results Now Available Up to Two Miles From Any Location

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

Last month we announced the launch of our API, which gives developers access to our database of local content including news stories, blog posts, and Twitter tweets within 1,000 feet of any specific location.

Amidst all the excitement, we noticed that some folks wanted to to grab results for a larger area.

You asked for it, so we’ve added an additional parameter to the API that allows you to enter a custom radius to get results for any distance up to two miles. Sweet!! Check out the documentation for instructions on how to use this new feature, and let us know if you have any questions in the outside.in API Google Group.

previously: API Developer Video

24
Oct 08

We’re One of the Best Sites for Local Networking. Score.

Posted by Nina in General — View Comments

According to the uber popular Small Business Search Marketing site, we’re up there along with Facebook and Twitter as one of the best social networking sites that local businesses can use to find and attract customers.  

Sweet! Thanks to Matt for the shoutout. 

6. outside.in

You’ve probably heard about the benefits of reaching out and starting relationships with bloggers. outside.in is one of two sites I’ll mention that can help you find local bloggers. outside.in is a content aggregator; they show content from both traditional media and blogs.

outside.in screenshot

You can’t contact the local bloggers directly through outside.in; it’s just for locating them. You’ll want to visit the local blogs you find, start reading them regularly, leaving quality comments, and eventually introduce yourself and start that relationship.

[via smallbusinessem.com]

 

22
Oct 08

Speaking @ The Business Model Summit Tomorrow

Posted by mark in Events / General — View Comments

I’ll be speaking at The Business Model Summit tomorrow 10:30AM @ the CUNY Graduate School of Journalism. Stop by, or check back here later tomorrow for a recap.

This is a fantastic forum to hear new ideas about the future of online journalism.  Also speaking will be Jeff Jarvis, Dave Morgan (founder of TACODA),  Edward Roussel of the Telegraph, Samir Arora of Glam, along with a handful of other innovators in the publishing space. 

 

update [10/23/08]:

[via the News Innovation website]

“You can’t put a reporter on a pothole in the current market,” says Mark Josephson. But Outside.in is there.

Consumer demand is not being met because coverage stops on the zip code level. The “new local” has to get to the personal experience: The house, the school, the church, and that pesky pothole that needs to be fixed on your street.

Now that anyone can become a local reporter on the web, coverage has become both personal and portable. Thank God for Google maps. Although Josephson is big on the new GeoTag. Get ths: the GeoTag is attached to a story, so you get the story, the location and every other location that matters to you.

Now news not only goes with you, in some ways, the stories become a part of you. And it’s free.

 

15
Sep 08

Blogiology 101: Intro to San Francisco Blogs

Posted by Nina in General — View Comments

This is our second in a series of posts where we explore top neighborhoods, blogs, and bloggers in cities around the U.S.  For background of our project, check out the inaugural post, which was all about Boston.

Today we explore San Francisco, land of great food, beautiful bridges, and birthplace of hippie culture.

SAN FRANCISCO
Bloggiest Neighborhoods:

  1. Civic Center
  2. SoMa
  3. Golden Gate Park
  4. South Beach
  5. Mission

Top Blogs:

  1. Curbed SF
    One of the more established blogs in SF, covering real estate sales, rental prices, architecture, and restaurant openings.
  2. SFist
    Billed as the “most popular blog in SF,” the folks at SFist have been covering the Bay area since 2004. Features, interviews, and general neighborhood gossip are mainstays of the site.
  3. Eater San Fransisco
    A sister blog of Curbed, Eater provides extensive coverage of the vast gourmand restaurant and bar scene in SF.
  4. All Shook Down
    While officially part of the the San Francisco Weekly, All Shook Down blog maintains its edge and unique coverage of the arts & music scene in SF.
  5. The San Francisco Citizen
    A relative newcomer, covering all sorts of quirky local news and happenings.

Up and Coming Blogs (in no particular order)

Most Talked About Stories:

  1. Median Ordered for Golden Gate Bridge
  2. The Slow Food Movement
  3. Murder of Hells Angels Leader
  4. Escalation of Violence in the Mission

Have your own SF top 5? Tell us about it. Leave a note in the comments section.
Methodology: Our rankings track local buzz by analyzing a mix of variables including: total number of posts, location of posts, links from other sites in the community, and feedback from Outside.in members. Bloggiest Neighborhoods/Top Blogs, past 30 days; Most Talked About Stories, past 7 days.

26
Jun 08

Kudos to Crime Solving Local Bloggers

Posted by josh in General / News — View Comments

This morning the New York Times had an article titled “Brooklyn Blog Helps Lead to Drug Raid.”

Participant’s on the BayRidgeTalk.com message board started talking about the suspicious activity and noise around a house in the neighborhood. Posts such as “Fighting and drug deals going down in the driveway of this house,” started appearing. Several neighbors also attended local community board meetings, filed complaints, and eventually got the attention of the police, who started a narcotics investigation which led to the arrest of three suspects on charges of conspiracy, drugs, and weapons charges.

This story is a great example of the way hyperlocal content starts dialogue, which can rally people, and then lead to action. Best summarized by a local pet shop owner involved on the site, “At the end of the day, it was about putting aside anonymity, putting aside the HTML and physically showing up.” Great advice for all of us to get up, get out, and meet our neighbors. And blog about it, of course.

Congratulations BayRidgeTalk.com.

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