Outside.in Relaunches with Improved Hyperlocal Search
I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Outside.in recently relaunched with all kinds of new focus on hyperlocal search. I’m tempted to call it a hyperlocal search engine, but that might just be the Search Engine Land editor in me coming out.
The full set of new features is detailed on the Outside.in blog. A quick summary would go like this:
- single search box offering search by city, ZIP, neighborhood, address, and place
- keyword search within any of those same geographic options
- RSS feeds for any search you conduct and any page on the site
- new design
Outside.in also says they’re trying to be smarter about figuring out your location when it’s not clear … like, if you just type “Columbus” in a search box, for example.
You can try out all of this on the new Outside.in home page. In my experience, it’s pretty cool overall — but, since I live in a smaller town, the new features are lost because of the lack of content. If you live in a bigger area, I trust your experience will be different.
And one more thing: see that third bullet point above, about the RSS feeds for any search/page? That’s pure gold if you’re planning to add a local “newswire” to your blog. Even if you have a super-targeted blog — say, about local education in your hometown — you can now get RSS feeds for that. Very cool.
Why NOW is the Best Time to Start a Local Blog
What’s the saying? When one door closes, another one opens. Yep. That’s what’s happening right now:
Newspapers take a bus plunge: circulation plummets 10.6 percent
Average weekday circulation at 379 daily newspapers was down 10.6% in the first half of 2009, compared to the first half of 2008. Ouch. 24 of the top 25 US newspapers suffered circulation losses in the first half of 2009. Double ouch. Some of those declines were more than 20%. Triple ouch. The Nieman Lab post puts this into perspective:
“The 10.6-percent decline means that since last year, about 4.5 percent of U.S. households have given up reading a printed newspaper, and that printed newspapers now reach less than 40 percent of U.S. households.”
Don’t get me wrong, please. I subscribe to and read our local newspaper every day, even if they do disrespect local bloggers. I’m not rooting for newspapers to fail. Okay? Okay.
But let’s face it: For local bloggers, this is an Opportunity. With a capital “o.” When I wrote about why hyperlocal blogging works, decline of the traditional media was high on that list. If you’re thinking about starting a hyperlocal news blog, there’s no better time than now to do it. Here’s why:
- Your neighbors are starting to shift their news-reading habits. The web will soon replace traditional media as the primary source of news.
- Traditional media is struggling, newspapers especially. The numbers above offer plenty of evidence.
- Not only are papers struggling, but many of them haven’t yet figured out how to elegantly transition to the web. Chances are good that there’s a void in your area where online news is concerned.
- Building an audience typically takes time. Your local blog probably won’t be an instant success. Start now, get those beginner’s mistakes out of the way, and get into a routine. Learn what works and what doesn’t in your hometown, and keep doing the former.
This shift from traditional media to online media is still in progress. Over time, more and more of your neighbors will turn to the Internet for local news and information. If you start now, you’ll be better prepared to give them what they want when they find you. Don’t wait. Do it. Go.
Tell Us About Your Hyperlocal Blog
We seem to be growing a nice little community of hyperlocal bloggers/web site owners here, so I thought it might be good to have a wide-open post where you get to introduce yourself and tell us as much as you want about your local blog/web site.
So how about doing that in the comments. Include links if you want (I’ll have to manually approve those comments, though) and just let us know who you are, where you are, tell us about your local blog, why you started it, ask each other questions if you see something interesting, etc. Think of it as an online mixer kind of thing. 
Comments are open.
Defining Hyperlocal
Last week I asked a question in this space: How do you define hyperlocal?, and you didn’t disappoint me in the comments. You shared some great replies and we ended up with a good discussion that touched on these issues, among others:
- Is it hyperlocal if my blog covers an entire suburb, as opposed to a single neighborhood?
- Does hyperlocal depend on geography or topic/content?
- How does community interest help define hyperlocal?
The reason I asked the question originally is this: I don’t think the word “hyperlocal” is being used correctly in a lot of discussion of hyperlocal blogs/sites/projects.
Example #1: ESPN has launched several web sites targeted at specific cities in the US, like ESPNChicago.com, ESPNDallas.com, ESPNBoston.com, and so forth. And a lot of the news coverage talks about ESPN going hyperlocal, like this piece.
Example #2: NBC recently launched 10 iPhone apps with local news and entertainment information. There are apps for San Francisco, New York, Chicago, and other major US cities. Some of the coverage of this talked about NBC going hyperlocal, like this piece.
My Opinion: A web site or mobile app that covers cities as big as Chicago, New York, and Dallas aren’t hyperlocal. They’re local, yes … but they’re not hyperlocal. If ESPN wants to get hyperlocal in Dallas, it needs to cover the local Little League teams, the prep football scene, and so forth. But ESPN’s sites cover professional and major college teams; those are teams with national-level followings. They’re not hyperlocal.
If NBC wants to create hyperlocal iPhone apps, it needs to have news from school board meetings, construction updates, and what’s happening at the community park this weekend. To their credit, the NBC apps do seem to offer restaurant reviews and other things that can certainly become hyperlocal in the right context. But there’s much more that needs to be done to really be able to call it hyperlocal, in my opinion.
I wonder if you agree with me on this point: Are the ESPN and NBC projects hyperlocal, in the truest sense of the word?
How to Create a Local Newswire for your Blog
I’ve mentioned before that my wife and I don’t run hyperlocal news blogs. Yes, we post news, but it’s not “hard news” and we purposely stay away from potentially polarizing topics like politics. That’s because the main purpose of the blogs isn’t to be a news source, but to indirectly increase my wife’s visibility as a local real estate agent. We post about community events, school-related news, and stuff like that, while skipping accidents, crime, politics, and so forth.
But I also recognize that people reading our blogs might want some more local news, so just this past week we added what I’ve called a “local newswire” to each of our four local blogs. Here’s a screenshot from the newswire on our Richland real estate blog:
This might be a valuable page for any hyperlocal blogger, whether you run a news blog or not. The main requirement is that you’re using WordPress. (If someone wants to write similar instructions for another blog platform, let me know and I’ll gladly link to it or let you post it here as a guest article.) If you’re using WordPress, here’s how to do it.
How to Create a Hyperlocal Newswire
1. Download, install, and activate the Lifestream plugin. This plugin lets you aggregate an unlimited number of RSS feeds into a single page on your blog. (Or into a post, I suppose.) Lifestream has its own requirements (PHP 5, MySQL 5+, etc.), so check your hosting setup to make sure it’ll work.
2. Make a list of local RSS feeds that you want to pull into your newswire. Local newspaper, local TV, you name it. Just grab the URLs of each RSS feed and save it in a text file.
3. Add each RSS feed URL into the Lifestream admin/settings page. As you can see from the screenshot below, Lifestream pre-supports a few dozen types of feeds — Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, and many more. I used a few of those, but mostly used the “Generic” RSS feed.
When you click on the “Generic” button there, it leads you to a short and simple form where you supply the feed URL. If you want, you can also give it a label that will show up on your public newswire page — like “WKRP News” or something like that.
If you want to have little customized icons like we do (see the Google and Yahoo icons in the first screenshot above), then you’ll need to create those (16 x 16 each) and indicate the URL for each icon when you add the feed. Or you can skip this and have the generic orange RSS feed icon show up each time. Your call.
4. Repeat step 3 for each feed you want to include in your newswire.
5. Create the newswire page. Just create the new page, give it a name and URL in your WordPress admin, and make sure to put
[lifestream]
as the page content. That’s all you need. Hit Publish and you’ve got a local newswire. Congrats! But wait, one more thing to share….
How to Handle Non-Specific RSS Feeds
If we had one blog for our entire region, the above is all I would’ve needed to do. But we have four blogs, one for each of the main cities in this area. And the local media covers all four cities — in other words, the local paper’s RSS feed includes news about all four cities, when we only want news from one city appearing on each blog.
How do you pull out news for a single city from an RSS feed that covers many cities?
Try Yahoo Pipes. Now listen, I’m one of the least technologically smart people I know. Programming makes my eyes glaze over and puts me to sleep. So if I can figure out how to use Yahoo Pipes, you can, too.
You’ll need a Yahoo account and all that stuff. Login to Yahoo, go to the Pipes URL above, and click the button to create a new pipe. Then here’s what I did:
1. Under the SOURCES tab on the left, click “Fetch Feed.” This adds a module to your pipe that lets you add any number of RSS feeds. Cut and paste the URLs of all the generic feeds into this module.
2. Under the OPERATORS tab on the left, click “Filter.” This adds a module that you can use to filter the content of your pipe. In my case, I’m taking the RSS feeds of all the local TV stations and the local newspaper and I’m going to filter them to include only stories that say “Richland” in the headline, and ignore stories that say “West Richland,” a separate town. (There are additional filtering options, but I’m just using this for now.)
3. Once you have both modules setup the way you want, make the pipe. Use the fun pipe-y interface to connect “Fetch Feed” to “Filter” and then connect “Filter” to “Pipe Output.” When you’re done, it should look something like this:
At this point, click the “Pipe Output” module to test what you’ve done. Some results should show up at the bottom of the screen, telling you that you’ve created your first Yahoo Pipe.
4. Wrap it up and get out of there. Save your pipe and give it a name if you haven’t already. Click the “Back to My Pipes” link, and then on that next page, click the name of your pipe — this will take you to the page that has the RSS feed of the pipe you just made.
5. Grab the pipe’s RSS feed URL and add it to Lifestream. Once you have the RSS feed URL, do the same thing you did in step 3 above when adding feeds to Lifestream.
Step 6 – pat yourself on the back for figuring out how to use Yahoo Pipes!
See It In Action!
If you’d like to see the four newswires we’ve just published, here are the links:
Richland Newswire
Kennewick Newswire
Pasco Newswire
West Richland Newswire
These are only a couple days old, so you’ll see that there’s still some cleanup work to do in places — fonts, font sizes, etc. And since they’re so new, I have no stats to share about how many times the pages get visited or anything like that.
Final Thoughts
I think there’s value in this kind of content no matter what kind of hyperlocal blog you have. For Cari and me, it adds a lot of news content to our blog — most of which we wouldn’t write about ourselves. But even if you do have a news blog, I think there’s value in aggregating other local news content so that your readers have a one-stop source for what’s going on locally.
As I mentioned, if there’s a way to do something similar on non-WordPress blogs, leave a comment or send me an email so I can link to your “how to” or invite to write one as a guest post. If you already have a newswire-type page on your blog, or have questions about what I’ve described above, the comments are open.
My Local Paper Disrespects Local Bloggers
Add my local newspaper, the Tri-City Herald, to the long (and growing) list of traditional media outlets that have no respect for citizen journalism and local blogs. They said so tonight in a conversation I was following on Twitter: “Who else will you trust? Bloggers? Tweeters?”
That was in response to a tweet from another local guy, Brian, who originally said the Herald will “be dead in a year.” A short back-and-forth ensued, eventually leading to this message:
I’m beyond tired of the lack of respect local bloggers are getting these days. I replied to the Herald (on Twitter) that comments like this make them sound scared of local bloggers, and reminded them that the Seattle Times recently had to run to four Seattle news blogs and agree to coordinate coverage.
Sheesh. Enough already.
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