OutsideIn

HyperLocal content-aggregator site by Steven Johnson http://outside.in/ Launched 2006, bought by AOL 2011.

• Platform for Citizen Journalism?

Hmm, no RSS feed. Which I guess has to do with Business Model...

possible revenue streams

• Google AdWords
• DoubleClick WebAd-s
• sell their own WebAd-s
• Classified Ads

competitors (for traffic and revenue), or data source?

• Google
• Craigs List
• City Search
• Technorati http://www.technorati.com/posts/tag/eastvillage , Del.icio.us http://del.icio.us/tag/EastVillage
• Newspaper Publishing crowd if they get their act together 2006-10-29-CurleyHyperLocalNews

East Village seems dominated by just a couple blogs. I'd add myself but I don't write much that's really local-focused.

• should they partner with others already getting geo data?
  • Plazes, DopplR
  • any Social Networking or WebLog host that gathers user-Zip Code data
• meta: how much of most people's writing is location-focused? Does that matter? Yes probably.
  • if you know general/static Zip Code for a writer, then you might be able to scrape content and look up capitalized phrases against a directory of Places (YellowPages?)...
• maybe tie to events, scrape Calendar sites?

notes from Oct'2006

Steven Johnson has just launched OutsideIn, a GeoTag-based aggregator. Everything seems to point to stuff elsewhere, with apparently no commentary, just first-snippets. Some of the content seems to be auto-scraped, others submitted/tagged by humans.

I think a service like this will eventually need:

• a way to filter ('or' query) on various tags defining your areas of interest
• filter based on weights of interest and near-ness (we're not only interested in the HyperLocal)
• maybe add a Social Network Context.

Does this really just become a GeoTag PipeLine feeding other apps?