outside.in: Yet another Newspaper Threat

As if the newspaper industry needed yet another upstart to threaten its very existence...  While reading the latest issue of Time, the one with "You" as the "Person of the Year", I came across an interesting article about outside.in, a site that describes itself as "a place to see in a single glance all the interesting things that are happening around you."

That sounds a lot like the local community focus most metro newspaper websites have yet to master.  They could learn a bit form outside.in.  The core idea is pretty simple: serve as an aggregator of blogs for cities across the country.  As of today, only 56 cities are represented, but it's pretty easy to add a blog or two for a missing city to get it on the map.  It's disappointing to see there are no entries for the entire state of Indiana, so I had to look up my original hometown, Pittsburgh, to see how outside.in works.

The current outside.in service is pretty useful although I can see plenty of opportunities to add more capabilities down the road.  Their aggregator functionality means you can have one RSS feed for all the blogs in a particular city.  Nice.  Keep an eye on this one as they expand and "come to your home town."  If you know of a blog with a local/community focus go to this link to add them to the outside.in service.
 

Comments

[Michael A. Banks]

Joe,
This looks similar to what the Cincinnati publishing site could be if enough people discover it and get active.

(I like the name of one blog in particular: Pittsblog. Or should that be Pittsblogh?)

I think outside.in and the Cincinnati Enquirer's GetPublished site are part of a leading edge phenomenon. The ability to determine content and publish almost immediately in a venue that's accepted by the public has tremendous appeal.

This could be the next wave, the post-blog world.

It's just like the earliest public Internet, when people logged on and started building worlds with the tools they found. And then the online services created more tools ...
--Mike
http://www.michaelabanks.com