Outside.in Gets Cash for Geocoding the Blogosphere

outsidein.pngAfter developing their product on their own for six months, New York based Outside.in received financing from angels and three venture firms: Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, and Village Ventures. Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures discusses the financing here.

Outside.in aims to aggregate posts from local bloggers (placebloggers) into one tagged and searchable directory. According to Fred Wilson, they hope to do for blogging, what Google local search has done for the web. Sites like Yelp, InsiderPages, and Smalltown are also building local communities, but based around reviews, with discussions and blogs playing a supporting role. An example of the directory in action: the latest blog posts for Palo Alto, CA. Each post is given context by presenting the user with a map of the location the post is coded to, and other blogs in the area with similar tags.

A blog’s whole feed is added to a local blogroll by user submission, but not all bloggers blog only about their local town. For blogs that occasionally write about an area, Outside.in has a bookmarklet for users to suggest individual stories, and a “Feedburner flare” option that adds a “geotag this” option to the bottom of your posts.