Outside.in Gets Cash for Geocoding the Blogosphere

Nick

Great post.

It’s so interesting to me that the top tags in the Palo Alto page you linked to are completely different than the top tags in the outside.in/10010 page that I linked to in my post that you linked to.

Seeing the most recent “placeposts” by geography is a great service, but I also really like seeing top tags by geography and blogrolls by geography.

you can really get a feel for a place pretty quickly in outside.in

Fred

This is a very cool idea.

I believe the key determinant of their success will be what percentage of blog content is primarily location-relevant. Clearly there are tons of geographically-driven monetizing options, but will the content draw enough people…because in many ways, the web makes location irrelevant.

Wow, this is actually pretty cool. I figured it would be just another failed attempt at rolling out a national product for local news/networking/etc, but was rather amazed at how well it integrated zip code/mapping features with various blogs/RSS feeds.

When I put in my zipcode, I learned that my state’s governor is hiding a DUI arrest, then I moved the map a couple blocks over and saw a local high school’s news. Cool.

Anita

Yikes- I think this post has taken the site offline

“outside.in is experiencing heavy traffic right now. Check back soon.”

Good first attempt– they’ve got a long way to go to make this work well, but it’s a fantastic try.

they are not adding the geocoding to the rss feeds for a neighbourhood, making the whole enterprise considerably less useful. in order to do that, they need georss support in their feeds.

Hey, thanks for the link and nice write-up.

I wanted to just point out two other cool things about the approach we’re taking.

First, we’re not geo-coding blog posts exclusively, though we’ve drawn upon about 1500 placebloggers to help fill the database (and avoid the first user problem in the cities we’re tracking.) But we’re also geo-coding just about anything that’s neighborhood or community-specific on the web: traditional media stories or reviews, hot threads on Chowhound, city government bulletins, etc. The idea is that you have ONE place that shows you all those different kinds of local information, organized by geography (as well as by topic, time, etc.)

We’ve also just added new a Places feature today, so that things like restaurants, real estate developments, public schools, etc will have a permalink that tracks everything (or as close to everything as we can get) that’s been said about them online, in the blogosphere and in other forums.

And yes, the site was briefly down, but I think we’re handling the load now!

Steven

UMmmm… one of my pet projects - BlockRocker - has been mapping blog posts for 6 months or so. It uses the technorati API to find posts tagged “geotagged” and then scrapes Lat/Lon coords from posts and maps them automatically.

This is painfully simple to do, and letting bloggers do so by geo-tagging posts means that any blog can make a location-relevant post about any location. No need to register for anything or whatever.

http://www.blockrocker.com/saved/38

I also built a little tool to generate cut&pastable geotags to dump into your blog tool:

http://www.blockrocker.com/service_geoblog.php

And, I did it all without VC funding! In all seriousness, I wish this was something I had time to commit too, but family and dayjob have relegated it to a permanent hobby for me. Perhaps with some more interest in the space its time to release another version of blockrocker.

craigslist like feel for blogs. Entire blogs in one db. Reminds me of feed searching services like tagjag.com — except, all the best stuff in one page.

Any other plans for users to add their blog into your database? Also, what kind of other search sorting features can we expect?

I got this one bookmarked.

Not that interesting to me.

I think outside.in is very interesting too.

However, their alexa rank is 132k, certainly not indicative of any type of traction.

So it begs the question, although the service is interesting, are people getting some use out of it?

Blog aggregation isn’t exactly sexy. Technorati sucks the air out of the room.

I think Outside.in needs to focus a bit more…

geocoding was an webapi-level commodity months ago.

when there’s a decent blog aggregator, someone holla.

Technocrapi? c’mon - let’s be serious. hasn’t that thing gone under yet? the only reason they still exist is because Giggle’s wannabe blog search thing is only slightly less worse.

I asked about this type of service on the TechCrunch spam boards last month, and someone mentioned feedmap.net. I loved it, originally, but then saw that all of the listed blogs were some type of uber-Christian thing, and most of them were about as bad as you’d expect. Plus, no rankings. But, it was the right idea.

This service? Ugly colors/UI, but i still love the idea. Something like this could help us to start talking to our neighbors - and thus thinking for ourselves - our government’s worst nightmare. That makes me smile.

http://forums.techcrunch.com/f.....&#8314

@Peter

“Technocrapi” has an alexa rank of 206. I don’t think they are going under anytime soon.

Please - enough with Alexa rankings already.

First, outside.in hasn’t even been around long enough to rate - (what, 6 months?).

Second, If you have access, check stats from a source more grounded in reality like Comscore or Hitwise — Technorati is not even a top *1,500* site, falling somewhere this week between akc.org and Hertz rent-a-car.

Whether or not either site has legs is beyond the blue dye in my magic 8-ball, but to make assumptions about their longevity based on Alexa score is not useful.

Am I the only one that went to Outside.in and found a lot of useless information? I looked at my neighborhood (South Beach in SF) and found random posts about real estate blogging, an upcoming show at a club, a post on what makes a neighborhood queer, what I think is a recipe, and something about thumbprints. This is what supposed to tell me what’s going on in my neighborhood?

While I do agree this is a very interesting idea, it has a long way to go before it becomes useful, at least for me. I also think a service like this needs to focus more on a specific kind of topic. What’s the point of aggregating thousands of blogs if the average user still has to wade through a bunch of irrelevant information?

“they hope to do for blogging, what Google local search has done for the web”

Again, you continue to attribute these things to Google… I just don’t understand it. Yahoo and others were there first, and Yahoo and Google are pretty much tied with Google in terms of share.

http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=11911

Forgive my frustration… but it’s enough already. They’re a great company, no doubt. But I if you read the blogosphere, you’d think the internet didn’t exist before Google.

Why not just: “they hope to do for blogging, what local search has done for the web”?

It’s down again. Too many users!

> Am I the only one that went to Outside.in and found a lot of useless information?

Yes, now geocoded to try and mask the uselessness

This is probably a short-sighted investment that won’t return anything.

Outside.in is cool and all, but I agree with Rothfuss that GeoRSS is needed. Assuming that a standard emerges (and bloggers use it), GeoRSS will allow *any* aggregator to be location-specific.

Hey all, thanks for all the supportive words — and the critiques!

As I mentioned before, I don’t think it’s quite right to think of us as a pure blog aggregator. Our geo-coding of the blogosphere does indeed look a little like Technorati, but our tools for letting anyone tag any geo-related content is much closer to delicious, and our Neighbor commenting tool (which we just launched yesterday) is closer in spirit to something like Yelp.

That approach is one of the reasons why we called it outside.in — we wanted to take an “outside-in” approach to grabbing *all* the local content on the web, not just from the blogs, not just from our users.

As for GeoRSS we’re actively investigating how to best integrate it into the service. (In part, the way we’re organized right now makes some of it redundant, but certainly not all.) But as to Matt’s comment: “Assuming that a standard emerges, GeoRSS will allow *any* aggregator to be location-specific” — I suppose that’s true technically, but we think there will be a clear need for a service that is fundamentally organized around geography (and communities) from the ground up. Assuming it takes GeoRSS another year to become a widespread standard, that should give us quite a bit of time to figure out other cool things to do with location-based services…

That looks like an interesting site.

I think that it is somewhat useful, and sometimes useless. What does a recipe have to do with location.

I think that geoblogging has some ups and downs. A down being Flickr.com/maps. The pictures were taken in a location, but if knowing that fact, doesn’t have any value, then who cares?

I have been working on a project http://www.grapheety.com that aims to solve that exact problem. Making geo-(blogged,tagged,etc.) information useful.

My intent is to provide a feel for an area before visiting. Something useful before making travel reservations to an unknown area. If people can tell stories and attach their pictures onto say a street corner, you will be able to cruise around and “feel” the area.

The inverse relationship, of just tagging coordinates on a blog doesn’t really meet this criteria…

Keep up the good work though!

Gavin P. Quinn
Grapheety

The new system will mimic speech in the real world”

Then you can enable talking on your land.
maruyasu-grape@world.odn.ne.jp
Who plays this silly game? I read about it, but I don’t know anyone who has actually played.

How will outside.in compensate bloggers for stealing their content?

How did you manage to get 290k of readers! thats the most ive ever seen

Why do I see only 49er stadium related blogs when I search santa clara zip code ?

They have all that money and they can’t even support Canada?

When writing about local American websites, can you please note it in the beginning of the article?…

I love this forum because people so often ask the questions that I would. With this post, however, I actually agree that I’m not as worried about the revenue. So many companies these days play what I call the “YouTube Lottery.” Everyone knows about the crazy money YouTube got, but not much is written (even on TechCrunch) about the 100s of companies that made it nowhere, They didn’t win the lottery the way that YouTube did.
http://www.usdownload.net