When you’re home, its useful to have a way of knowing what’s happening where and when, near your home. Add more people to your home (like a family) it becomes even more relevant. At work, similar need but reduced time – so tell me where I can eat lunch, what specials may be happening, or maybe what business opportunities may exist near me. And on it goes – you work somewhere, you travel places, you visit areas, you stay in hotels, etc.. What’s within 15 or 20 minutes of my location? Closer is better. Precision location is important too – I want to know what’s happening, maybe everything that’s happening – but only in this one particular area. My company is delivering that (geosemble.com). But the trend toward hyperlocal will continue because of the utility and relevance of that information to users.

As we peer into the future, I believe we’ll see tools that tap more and more dynamic, raw sources and link them to locations for “live” web data feeds. That’s the good news. The difficult part is that the job of analyzing signal to noise and refining and delivering data – what journalists traditionally did – now falls to users of raw feed data and risks leading to obsessive compulsive, data overload behavoir. As with all new technology, it will fall to us to find the middle way.

Just this morning I received a request from a group selling rain barrels to my community and asked me if I could post the information for them. It doesn’t get much more local than that. The majority of my traffic comes from local searches. Where I’m at, Joe cares about his community for sure.