Hyper Local News Widget – Outside.in

Outside.in is a service that aggregates and distributes local content such as blog posts, user profiles, news articles, and local business websites.  Content is submitted by Outside.in “neighbors” (members) via a URL submission and tagging tool, and is pushed out to the profiles of site members based on which the zip code which is associated with their account.

While there are plenty of automated local news services out there – Topix and Google News come to mind – Outside.in parses local news and content down to the zip code or neighborhood level.  Depending on where you live, Outside.in can provide you with fresh news that has been tagged to correspond with your individual zip code.

Until just a few days ago, all activity – both article submission and consumption – could only take place on the Outside.in website.

Enter the Outside.in news widget.

The Outside.in news widget displays article headlines specific to your zip code via a customizable Javascript widget – you can see my news feed for San Francisco’s Mission District in the left hand sidebar of this blog.

This widget has important implications for Outside.in for a number of reasons.  On the distribution side, by freeing up its content so that it can show up anwhere, Outside.in has just sweetened the pot for local content publishers in terms of potential distribution reach.  This is a big deal, as unlike Google News, Outside.in is not a crawler driven business.  It relies on content that is manually and explicitly submitted via its site, and only after a registration.

There are also benefits on the marketing side.  While the widget serves as a distribution platform for Outside.in content, it also serves as a marketing tool to attract more consumers and producers of local content.

Overall, I like the thinking behind this service.  Like many, I associate myself pretty closely with the neighborhood that I live in.  I consider my neighborhood to be the best in all of San Francisco, and view folks who live in different neighborhoods – like say the Marina – as if they were from another planet (or at least, from another city).  Getting news and opinion down to the zip code level is a big deal.

While I do have some quibbles with the execution (why put a registration obstacle in front of content submitters?  Why can’t I change the title of my widget? Where are the distributed content submission tools? Why can’t I edit my content submissions?), I plan on leaving the Outside.in widget in my sidebar for the foreseeable future.

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