Prompt's TechBlog
Geotagging brings the outside in
20 April 2007
Posted by Fiona Campbell-HowesThe web is often blamed for the demise of the local community. If you believe the mainstream media, people now sit alone in their bedrooms, frequenting insalubrious chat forums, typing mundane nonsense into blogs, and making worthless virtual friendships on MySpace.
But while it's true that more people are using the web to make online friends, there are signs that the web could also drive renewed interest in the local community. A new breed of entrepreneur is exploiting emerging Web 2.0 technologies to create community websites aimed at getting real-world neighbours together.
One such entrepreneur is Steven Johnson, the author of several bestsellers, including Everything Bad Is Good For You. Johnson's interests in city life and web technologies spurred him to create www.outside.in, a site that gathers information and online chatter about individual neighbourhoods and publishes it in one place.
Outside.in exploits a technology called geotagging, a type of metadata that lets people assign a geographical location to web content. The site gathers all content - from blog posts to media articles, photos and maps - with the same geotag, and aggregates it into one place where it can be easily browsed.
The result, as Johnson explains in his blog, is 'a glimpse of all the textured, real-world issues and conversations and news unfolding in [that] location.' People can quickly find out what the hot topics of conversation, or 'in' places, are in their community, and readily join in the discussion. The idea is that people will congregate around local places and issues, and start to socialise more with their neighbours.
With its emphasis on participation, outside.in represents an evolution from sites like British dotcom survivor upmystreet.com, which displays useful local information for a given postcode, but doesn't include user-generated content like blog posts.
While outside.in is currently limited to a few US cities, it is expanding thanks to recent funding. My guess is that similar sites will start to emerge in the UK even before outside.in arrives on these shores.
Tags: outside.in | geotagging | steven johnson
Labels: web 2.0
Comments:
Outside.in is a nice idea, but I don't think the implementation is quite there yet.
The site assumes that bloggers only write about one area (which excludes travel blogs) and seems to be based on people going to the site and telling them what the content's about. It would have been more interesting if they had suggested a tag-based system so that people could just register their blog, post content and tag it and have outside.in automatically sort it - the kind of thing the semantic web is supposed to be able to do with more useful descriptions of content types. And the kind of thing technorati already does on a simple level. Imagine having to register each post with technorati? That's a bit like this site at the moment, unless all your content is dedicated to one place.
Also, they're US only at the moment.
There are quite a few systems for trying to work out where a site visitor is based, which are often accurate to within 30 miles nowadays. It would be interesting to see this integrated, so there's a 'places near you' link.
One to watch, but not one that's much use to me at the moment.
Actually, having had a deeper look, I've found this:
http://outside.in/blog/2007/01/23/outsidein-and-feedburner/
You can geotag individual posts using a feedburner plug-in. So it looks like site visitors get an equal vote on the tags as the content owner, and it's likely to be difficult to automate the tagging because it's not within the HTML. Still, a big step in the right direction. I can't help thinking that the whole thing would be much more scalable if the focus was on tagging rather than the webpage and blog submission.
Yes, I think the 'semantic web' in general has a long way to go before projects like this can be truly automated.
I've started tagging relevant posts on my personal blog with the appropriate London postcode, in case a not-yet-existing London equivalent to outside.in wants to pick them up in future, but at the moment (and to my completely untrained eye), tagging just seems to be in a gloriously disorganised mess.
On the other hand, the Hype Machine (for example) seems to be thriving very well simply on the basis of people suggesting blogs that they should track, rather than on any kind of automated aggregation of all blogs that post audio files.
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