They don’t want it anymore.

Greg Sterling first mentioned in passing that MapQuest Local — the company’s excellent local start page — is going away, and that immediately made me wonder if the local blog content would be, too. I spoke today with MapQuest GM Christian Dwyer and he confirmed that it is … although MapQuest may bring it back in the future.

Background

If you’re not familiar, take a look at local.mapquest.com and you’ll see what this is about. That’s the home page for MapQuest Local, and it should default to your current location. You should see, somewhere near the top, a “Blogs in…” widget like this one from the Seattle page:

You can see that there’s an “Add Your Blog” button, and some real estate agent has wisely taken MapQuest up on that offer. I don’t know how much exposure she’s received, but this was always a pretty brain-dead simple thing to do. Even if it didn’t lead to a ton of new visitors to your hyperlocal blog, it also didn’t require a ton of effort to setup … so any exposure was a fair trade.

Current Situation

MapQuest Local will eventually go away, Dwyer tells me, and the support for accepting local blog content will go with it. He says there’s no timetable for this to happen, though; it depends on how quickly MapQuest users adopt the new MapQuest home page at new.mapquest.com. When there’s substantial adoption there, the “classic” version of MapQuest, along with MapQuest Local, will go away.

For now, MapQuest is bringing in local blog content … but, as an AOL-owned property, it’s focusing on content from AOL’s growing Patch network. Dwyer showed me Maplewood, NJ, restaurant listings in MapQuest’s system that are pulling business information from the Patch hyperlocal site covering Maplewood.

Future Possibilities

But all isn’t lost for local bloggers. Dwyer did say that MapQuest is thinking about how to capture local blog content from non-Patch sources and make it part of the main experience on the new MapQuest.com. A likely addition to come sooner than that will be local news sourced from AOL’s news property.

Bottom line: It may be many months before MapQuest Local goes away, so if you want to submit your blog to the local site covering your area … go for it. Just be aware that it won’t be around forever.

(PS – while you’re on MapQuest, do check out the new site. It’s got some pretty darn cool mapping tools that I’ve not seen on Google Maps or anywhere else.)

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

MapQuest Dropping Local Blog Support

• 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:

1. 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.
2. 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.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Fwix Looks Cool, Unless You Live in a Small Town

I don’t know who or what WIVB is, but the other two links there both point to the West Richland Real Estate blog, one of the four that my wife and I write.

How on Earth Did That Happen?

What you’re looking at is one of the initial integrations of Outside.in’s partnership with CNN, which dates back to December when CNN sank some money into Outside.in.

Peter Krasilovsky reports that Outside.in content is also showing up now on CNN’s weather page and on user profile pages, too. I see the Outside.in headlines on the weather page, but they’re not nearly as targeted/accurate as the screenshot above. On the weather page, the “local” headlines below the West Richland weather mostly come from Seattle sources (with one from Kansas City, too).

How do I get my local blog on CNN, too?

Pretty simple: Submit your site to Outside.in for Bloggers, which was formerly known as the Outside.in GeoToolkit.

By the way, there’s no SEO value from these links; they first pass through the Outside.in API, then through your feed URL, and then to your blog. But CNN is (obviously) a hugely popular site, so I’ll be watching to see if there’s any traffic increase in the coming days and weeks.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Is Your Blog on CNN’s home page? Mine is

The site offers a US map and a UK map of hyperlocal blogs, both of which are obviously far from complete. But you can do your part to help out by using this link to suggest a site for the directory.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Go Hyperlocal Maps US & UK Blogs

The FAQ page describes what it takes to be listed:

“If the blog is based in Minnesota or written largely for a Minnesota audience — and the writer updates at least once in awhile — it will get listed.”

There you go. You can submit your blog here. I’ve added Newsbobber to my growing list of local blog directories. It’s now the third one covering Minnesota. What’s up with that??!

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Blogging in Minnesota? Submit to Newsbobber

Mike Blumenthal has written a long and detailed post about this, and I highly recommend you read that to understand what Google is doing with local blog content. But I’ll also show a couple screenshots of what I’m referring to below.

First, try it yourself: Go to Google Maps and type your domain name into the search box. Do any local business results show up? If that doesn’t work, use our blog as an example — type “kennewickrealestateblog.com” into the search box, and you should see a handful of businesses/listings.

All of those are places we’ve written about on the Kennewick blog. Some were only passing mentions of a sentence or two. Others, like the bottom one you see, was a full review of a local restaurant. If you click on the listing for that restaurant in Google Maps, you’ll see our blog showing prominently — not under reviews, unfortunately, but under the “more about this place” section.

The placement isn’t ideal, but it’s still a potentially good source of exposure. Google Maps has surpassed MapQuest as the number one site in the Travel/Mapping space, and Google continues to promote Maps to both business users and searchers.

What You Should Do: There’s nothing to install or sign up for; if you think there’s value in seeing your blog listed as a resource in Google Maps, try this:

1. (Continue to) Write about local businesses.
2. When it makes sense, include the street address or phone number of the business in your blog post. Google uses this information to match your content with its business listings.
3. Be patient. This stuff doesn’t show up in Google Maps overnight.

That’s it.

It’s good to see Google recognizing the value of local blog content. I can’t help but wonder if they’re planning anything along the lines of Bing’s Local Lens tool. At the moment, that seems to be the gold standard when it comes to the marriage of search engines and hyperlocal blog content.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Google Using Hyperlocal Blogs as Review Sources

The (loose) criteria are that the sites serve as a “replacement” or supplemental news source in areas where the local newspaper or broadcast companies are dropping coverage. The scope can be local, state or national and be niche or broad-focussed — it just needs to be a journalistic endeavor with a newsgathering mission and not part of a corporate media site. However, no hate-speech sites please, such as a community site that serves only to bash a certain group or political figure or to spread unverified/false information.

I’ve added it to my list of local blog directories post. It’s good to see more sites trying to collate local blog resources.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Run a News Blog? Check out InOtherNews.us

Today’s news makes this CNN headline from last May borderline prescient:

Indeed, it may be. There’s plenty of evidence: CNN invests in Outside.in … MSNBC buys Everyblock.com … the New York Times has launched its hyperlocal effort called “The Local” … AOL has its hyperlocal project called Patch … the Huffington Post is getting into hyperlocal blogging … the Seattle Times is collaborating with hyperlocal blogs … Fisher launched 43 hyperlocal sites in Seattle and is expanding that model in other areas … the Guardian (UK) is starting a hyperlocal news network … other UK newspapers are also going hyperlocal … and so on and so forth.

What’s It Mean for Hyperlocal Bloggers

Generally speaking: The attention on what you’re doing is only going to grow. Sure, there will always be detractors and some who have no respect for what you’re doing. Ignore them. Now is the best time to start a local blog, or to keep growing what you’ve already started.

More specifically: If CNN is going to feature feeds on its web site from Outside.in, as the WSJ says it will, you better make sure your blog is in Outside.in’s system. You can do that by signing up (for free) for Outside.in’s GeoToolkit.

Go do it!

Update, December 8: The official news release explains how Outside.in content will be integrated with CNN:

“As part of its investment, CNN Worldwide entered into a concurrent multi-year deal to use the Outside.in for Publishers aggregation and curation platform to power hyperlocal news across all of CNN.com and its related properties. The first implementations are expected to be completed in Q1 of 2010.”

(If you’re interested in reading more about the CNN/Outside.in news, there’s discussion on Techmeme.)

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

CNN Invests in Outside.in

They can be reading your blog — without needing a laptop or smartphone — thanks to Zinepal.com, a service that takes any online content and turns it into a fairly customizable and printable publication. Before looking at how it works, let me show you what the final product looks like:

(click for larger version)

 

That’s page one of a print version of our West Richland Real Estate Blog. And here’s the download link for the full, three-page PDF (about 1mb): westrichlandblog.pdf.

It took about five minutes to make that — from login on zinepal.com to “save PDF.” It’s really simple, and if I wanted to spend a little more time in blog prep, I could’ve removed some of the extraneous things like “No related posts” and so forth. But even without the extra cleanup to make the blog perfectly print-ready, I think that’s still a pretty darn compelling piece of local information that people would read if they saw it in a waiting room somewhere.

How to Print Your Blog

It’s really simple. Follow along here:

1.) Create an account on zinepal.com. Be careful what login name you choose, because it will show up in small print at the top of your print zine. I should’ve chosen “Matt McGee” as my login name instead of “pleeker,” a common nickname I have. Zinepal is free to use, but there are also paid “pro” accounts that give you more control over how your zine looks and let you add advertising images, for example.

2.) Provide the URL or RSS feed of your blog. You can do this right from the home page, and after a few moments of collecting content, Zinepal will automatically put the most recent five stories in your zine, and then let you choose additional stories to include.

(click for larger version)

 

When you’re done choosing what to include, you click the gray “Customize & Create My Zine” button at the top (above what’s shown on the image).

3.) Customize Your Zine. You can create a custom welcome message (the gray box of text in the screenshot of our zine earlier in this post), which is a great place to put your blog’s URL and explain to people that they’re reading a print version of it. You can also customize the name/title of your print version, just in case you want it to be different from the actual blog name, and you can make some basic font/size choices. With a pro account, several more options are available, as shown below.

(click for larger version)

 

When you’re ready, you can preview or create the zine. I suggest, and Zinepal does, too, that you preview it first so that you can more easily make any needed changes.

You’re Done!

It really is that simple. You’ll end up with a PDF that can be printed, copied, and distributed around town to your heart’s content. Even web-ready, low-res photos look fine because they’re being printed in a small format.

My only issue with what Zinepal offers is that your PDF/zine will automatically contain a “Created by Zinepal” plug in small print at the bottom of each page. It would be nice if pro account holders could remove that, but the web site doesn’t list that as a feature. and as Frank (from Zinepal) explains in the comments below, pro account holders can remove that small print.

Still, it’s a small beef and small print or not, I think this kind of grassroots, local newspaper/magazine could be a big tool in promoting your hyperlocal blog.

Your turn: What are your thoughts on doing print versions of your local blog? Do you already do something like this? If not, would you consider it? How do/would you promote and distribute a print version of your blog?

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Turn Your Blog Into a Newspaper with Zinepal

Read the about page to get an idea of the kind of blogs/sites they’re looking to include. If yours fits, this could be a nice way to get some extra exposure and promotion for your efforts.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

New Local UK Blog Directory