TwitZip: Twitter’s Unofficial Hyperlocal News Network
This is brilliant. Ever heard of TwitZip? It’s a network of hyperlocal Twitter accounts, each one based on local ZIP codes, that sends out tweets around the clock with the latest news from that zip code. But it doesn’t just send out automated tweets, it also lets Twitter users report news to Twitzip for retweeting.
It’s the brainchild of a couple guys named Nathan Heinrich and Aaron Donsbach, who grabbed all the ZIP code-based Twitter accounts they could get their hands on a couple years ago. (Guys: You missed 99302 for Pasco, Washington.) Here’s a look at one my local ZIP codes, twitter.com/99352:
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TwitZip has partnered with Outside.in to get its hyperlocal news feeds running through each Twitter account. TwitZip’s home page says it has a partnership with Groupon to post local deals, and that local weather and government alerts are coming next.
TwitZip & Hyperlocal Blogging
On one hand, TwitZip competes with hyperlocal bloggers as a source of local news. But local news isn’t a zero-sum game, so I think it’s shortsighted to focus on that aspect of what TwitZip is doing. Instead, think of how TwitZip can help your hyperlocal blog. Here are four ways I can think of off the top of my head:
- As a news source. The first thing I did was add all of the local TwitZip accounts to my Tri-Cities Twitter list. This is the list I monitor to keep track of what’s happening around town — it’s my Twitter news feed, and TwitZip will make it better.
- As a distribution channel. (part 1) If TwitZip is getting content from Outside.in, here’s my millionth recommendation that you add your local blog to Outside.in’s system. That should get your blog content into TwitZip and could increase your Twitter exposure.
- As a distribution channel. (part 2) TwitZip is setup to automatically retweet messages that are sent as @ replies to it from Twitter followers. In other words, follow your local ZIP code and then include an @ message to it and it’ll retweet your message. (Wonder how TwitZip will handle spam/junk that comes through via this method….)
- As content for your blog. Beyond getting news tips (#1 above), you can take the RSS feed(s) from your local TwitZip accounts and add them to your hyperlocal newswire if you added one to your blog.
You can learn more about TwitZip via their web site, and also via this article last week on Silicon Prairie News.
Your turn: Is TwitZip something you’d use in conjunction with your local blog? What are your thoughts on it? Comments are open.
EveryBlock Launches Hyperlocal Content Widgets
This could be a pretty neat addition to your hyperlocal blog … if you live in one of the 16 cities that EveryBlock covers: EveryBlock Widgets. It’s an embeddable piece of code that will auto-display hyperlocal data/content on your blog/site. Here’s how EveryBlock explains the process:
You choose one of 16 EveryBlock cities, type in a location, choose the types of content you’d like to see, and we give you HTML code you can copy and paste into your blog or site template.
You can show news at an exact address, a block-radius around an address, a specific neighborhood, or an entire ZIP code. You can tweak it to show just crime, or just crime and building permits, and so on. You can also choose exactly which media sources you’d like to display.
The widgets are available at www.everyblock.com/widget/, and once you get started, the “builder” tool is pretty simple:
(click for larger version)
The ability to customize the exact size (height and width) means you can put a widget pretty much anywhere you want on your blog.
ChicagoScanner.com is a site that uses the widget right on its home page. Scroll down a bit and you’ll see a widget showing news from a single zip code. My Ballard, one of the popular Seattle hyperlocal sites, has created a page called the Ballard Wire, which looks like this:
(click for larger version)
Seems to me that the only drawback is that EveryBlock only covers 16 cities. My little town isn’t one of them, and wouldn’t even be on the radar. If you’re in the same boat as me, feel free to check out my post from last year, How to Create a Local Newswire for your Blog.
If you’re in one of EveryBlock’s cities, this seems like something worth checking out. Let me know what you think of it and how you’re using it. Comments are open.
Great Content Ideas from Talk About Local
If you’re looking for things to write about, let me direct you over to Talk About Local, where the folks there are on a roll with hyperlocal content ideas. They’ve posted several articles in the last couple days, like:
- Content idea: search YouTube for locally relevant videos to post on your website
- Content idea – store opening times
- Content idea: planning applications
And many more. It seems that the best way to access all of these articles is to browse through the Quick Tips category. There are some other posts mixed in, but you’ll find a lot of “content idea” headlines, too. Nice work, TAL gang.
Fwix Looks Cool, Unless You Live in a Small Town
Fwix is a pretty compelling local content provider … unless you live in a smaller metro area like me (and millions of others). Fwix covers cities in the US, Canada, Great Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. It’s basically an aggregator of local news and content from a variety of sources:
- local papers, radio, and TV news
- local blogs – see below
- official government data sources
- Weather Underground
- Flickr, Twitter, and other social sites/tools
- Yelp, Foursquare, and Gowalla
- real estate listings from Trulia
- etc.
Look at the Seattle or even the Spokane pages, and you’ll probably agree they make a pretty strong news and content hub for those cities. I might love Fwix if I lived there.
But I live in Tri-Cities, WA (Kennewick, Pasco, and Richland) and Fwix actually thinks we’re a suburb of Spokane, which is about 150 miles away. Oh, if the locals see that, no one will ever visit Fwix again. I’ve used this form to request that Fwix add my city, and stop listing us as a Spokane suburb.
Until that happens, I can’t use some of the cool stuff Fwix is offering. Like…
Fwix Widgets
Fwix recently started offering widgets that can be customized and embedded into any web site. Here’s the Spokane widget, for example:
I’ve customized that to NOT show status updates from Twitter, but it does show pretty much everything else: news, events, photos, reviews, weather, and deals. If you’re more of a programmer, you might prefer the Fwix API.
In addition to widgets, Fwix users can create custom feeds/pages made up only of the stuff you care about — sort of like how My Yahoo or iGoogle works.
How Can Fwix Help Your Hyperlocal Blog
Two ways I can think of immediately:
- As a news dashboard for your own coverage. If Fwix has enough good content sources in your hometown, it should provide a good, daily snapshot of what’s going on around town and provide ideas/tips for things you can/should cover on your site, too.
- As a potential traffic source. Local bloggers can submit to the Add Your Blog page. I’ve just submitted via this form within the last couple days, so I don’t know how soon submissions are processed, what kind of review process there is, and so forth. (And since Fwix doesn’t really cover my area, it may be a while before I find out.) But if Fwix grows, it could become a good opportunity for more exposure.
Your turn: Have you checked out Fwix? What are your thoughts? How’d it go when you submitted your blog? Comments are open.
How Does Your Online News Operation Compare?
Michele McLellan shared some interesting stats a few days ago at the Reynolds Journalism Institute web site. The numbers are from a survey of 66 online news sites that was done in April and May.
Where does your content come from?
The 66 publishers said that nearly half of their content comes from paid staff members — either full-time or part-time staff. Volunteers and students make the next two largest content sources, at 27% and 8% respectively. “Content partners” also generate 8% of local news content, and user-generated content accounts for 7%.
Accomplishing goals?
This question caught my eye: The survey asked the local online publishers to list how important various goals/tasks are, and then to grade themselves on how well they’re meeting those goals. The biggest discrepancy between importance and success: operating a sustainable business. That’s probably not too surprising. Here’s the chart.
That’s just a teaser of what you’ll find in the full article. There are some interesting stories and quotes from the folks who run the hyperlocal news operations that were surveyed.
If you read it, the obvious question is: How does your news site compare?
New Hyperlocal Experiment: Topic Pages
You may have heard of the phrase “topic pages” already — it’s a fairly popular idea these days in journalism circles. The idea behind a topic page is that, rather than have multiple articles or posts about the same thing all competing with one another for attention, you collate them on a single “topic page.” For examples, see how the New York Times has created dozens of topic pages.
The goal is that the topic page becomes the authoritative resource for information about the topic. And generally, by “authoritative,” we mean it’s the page that earns and holds most of your search rankings about that topic, and the page that you can always refer people to when they need information. They’re kinda like Category pages, but not quite. I’ll explain the problem I hope a topic page will solve for one of our blogs, and show how we’ve setup our first topic page below.
What Problem Does a Topic Page Solve?
Primarily, it solves the problem that — for some topics — your hyperlocal blog might have lots of great information spread across multiple articles. Secondarily, some of those articles may be old or outdated and it becomes a challenge to keep them updated for new searchers who land on them via Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.
My Specific Problem
In West Richland, there’s an annual event called Hogs & Dogs that attracts more people to the city than we have residents. It’s that big. We’ve been covering it since our blog launched in 2008, and we now have more than a dozen posts about Hogs & Dogs — some from 2008, some from 2009, and some from this year.
People come to this event from all over the Pacific Northwest, and they find our blog after searching online for information. But sometimes they hit a 2008 post, sometimes a 2009 post, and rarely a current post because the new content doesn’t always rank as well as the older stuff. So, we’re forced to go back and try to update all the old posts with links to the new content, like this:
That doesn’t really scale. You can’t keep going back and updating all the old posts (the ones that get search traffic) with links to all the new posts. So, our hopeful solution is the topic page.
Creating a Topic Page
Here’s how we’re doing this:
1.) Not a post, but a page. Rather than create a new blog post, we’ve created a Wordpress Page. You can see it here: Hogs & Dogs. It’s somewhat bare right now, but we’ll add more content about the event as we get it. The theme we’re using (Canvas by Woo Themes – aff) allows us to create pages without having them show up in the page navigation, which is nice.
2.) Permanent URL. Although the content will be updated each year, Hogs & Dogs information will always be available at the same URL: http://westrichlandrealestateblog.com/hogs-dogs/.
3.) SEO & human-optimized content. We’ve created this page primarily for human visitors, but with the understanding that most of them will find it via search engines. The keyword is in the URL. I’ve optimized the page title. And we mention “west richland” and “hogs and dogs” several times in the page content.
4.) Evergreen, easy-to-update content. The page title says “2010″ but I can update that easily when the 2011 event rolls around. The page also lists date and time info, plus this year’s big raffle prize. All of that is evergreen content that I can easily trade out next year.
5.) Link to it often. No doubt we’ll be writing new blog posts as the event gets closer, but each new post will also link to this topic page and position it as the ultimate resource about the event.
Final Thoughts
The Hogs & Dogs event doesn’t happen until June, and even though people are already searching for information now — search traffic won’t really spike until the week before the event. We basically have about two months to get this page ranking for the terms that people use on the main search engines. I’ll let you know how it goes after the event has come and gone. If it works, we’ll be doing more of these on all our hyperlocal blogs.
Your turn: Are you using topic pages on your blog/site? Are they working? If you’re not, is it something you’d consider creating? Comments are open, as always.
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UPDATE, APRIL 26: For an update on this, please see Update: Topic Page Experiment.
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