Fwix Looks Cool, Unless You Live in a Small Town
by Matt on Jun 7, 2010 in Content, Promotion
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.
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Hi, Matt – looks like that Fwix widget is smart enough to sense that I’m in Virginia, and it’s showing me Virginia headlines instead of Spokane.
Interesting site. I live in the city of Corona, which is just outside of Orange County, CA and they actually have it listed, but what’s interesting is that it shows the correct map for the city but is feeding news for Corona Del Mar. I’m hoping by adding our Corona blog we might turn up as the only true Corona resource on the page. Thanks for sharing Matt!
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