Given that they use keywords to tie news to locations, I’m surprised that false positives aren’t an issue. I mean, you’d think that if you have a story which mentions Lincoln, it would pop up for people living on Lincoln Avenue, a story about Paris Hilton would pop up in Paris, CA, a story about political perspectives might be a match for Something-or-Other View, etc.

There are several challenges ahead though.

As someone mentioned, location detection from IP address can only be
approximate – it will typically locate your ISP, not your house.

I think that news density could be a challenge. In major metropolitan areas you’ll likely find hundreds of stories within a few square miles – how can you filter those so the best rise to the top? Google news does location-based filtering without the map presentation, I think.

But building critical mass traffic-wise could be the biggest challenge here.
In order to attract advertisers, you have to show them you have enough page-views on the street ‘hyper-local’ granularity.

In order to do that, you have to pick several locations and promote in each intensely – or else, try to ‘boil the ocean’ by building traffic over the entire US… in which case you’re competing with major media.
So what’s the strategy to get those eyeballs?

Finally, if you have enough locality traffic – you have to find the local vendors who are up to speed with putting local ads on the web..

There were one or two sites trying to put localized coupon feeds out…
The startups I’ve seen trying that (form about a year ago) look like they are now in the deadpool – no response to inquiries. Any updates from TC?

Anyway, just some thoughts there- overall I liked the site, nice job!

http://fakestev...er.blogspot.com

I like to see more action in local because I think it’s massively, unfathomably overlooked considering the potential for ad revenue and the health of communities.

Of course you guys probably have plenty of criticisms of HoundWire.com.

James Nicholson from YourStreet here. First off, thanks for all the kind words. It’s great to show off the site after many months of hard work.

For those of you finding stories that are not properly categorized, I definitely understand. We’re trying to develop an application that will be as close to 100% perfect as we can, but we’re obviously not quite there yet. But we’re continually working on our system and I think over time you will see YourStreet get more and more accurate. You can help by clicking the “Wrong Location?” button located under each article – this helps us get better.

Vinay and Clare: YourStreet currently works only for the U.S. We had to start somewhere and trying to get the U.S. right is not easy. We do plan to expand coverage internationally in the not too distant future, so stay tuned.

NYC: we are working to improve Safari compatibility asap. As a Mac user, I too want to see this.

Thanks again for all the constructive comments!