This is a clever twist on a very important emerging market of location based content, Outside.in. Check it out. Steven’s announcement here.
…the site is ultimately about a new kind of experience. You sit at a computer and type in a street address, or a neighborhood name, or a zip code — perhaps for your own home area, perhaps for a place you’re visiting or interested in — and within seconds the screen gives you a glimpse of all the textured, real-world issues and conversations and news unfolding in the location you’ve entered. Not just restaurant reviews or upcoming concerts, but the
Outside.In name is misleading as “.IN” domains tell you that it’s a website for India.
Blockrocker.com has been doing something similar to this for a while, but based on user tagged content – it maps events, photos, classifieds, blog posts, youtube videos, wikipedia pages, delicious tags, etc – down to the street level. Zoom in on your neighborhood, and you get an experience that sounds similar to what outside in is describing. BR, however, is content-light – there aren’t that many people out there that car enough about local level stuff to actively geotag their blog posts and del.icio.us links for instance.
I had hoped, for example, that people would geotag their delicious links for reviews of restaurants they enjoyed. The hoped for active userbase has failed to materialize however – perhaps because the site has never been promoted, perhaps because geotagging is very niche-y.
Oh well – good luck to Outside.in.
As Dreadsword says geotagging is not a mass sport, as compared with photo tagging, but there’s a niche, certainly, and word-of-mouth can make a site blossom modestly: Tagzania has grown that way. Outside.in’s approach is different, editorial work defines the places to follow, then venues and addresses there are parsed. I think that, at the end, there’s a much greater long tail of geographic content out there, than the limited universe of X US cities as followed by Y detected bloggers, and the strategy of letting users geotagging their own stuff (more the approach of Tagzania, BR and others) may be more sustainable.
OhLocal.com is dedicated to serve local posting based on zip code.