Monday, March 17. 2008

Outside.in Uses FireEagle for "Facebook feed applied to geo"

Some interesting tidbits came out of the discussion between Stephen Johnson CEO of outside.in, a hyperlocal news site, and Henry Jenkins at SXSW (South by Southwest, the tech/music/arts event held in Austin last week) Jenkins is Co-Director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT.

"[outside.in CEO] Johnson took the opportunity to describe his recent project: “Our project, Outside.in, is trying to build out the infrastructure for the geographic web. The fear in the 1990s is that no one would want to live in a city again because of the digital revolution, but the opposite has been true. The Internet is actually an urban location enhancing device. At the level of neighborhood and community, people care passionately about what is happening. People have a lot of expertise, a great deal of interest, and that zone is completely uncovered by traditional media."

"We built Outside.in as a service to help people see those conversations and use geotagging tools to tag different aspects of neighborhoods,” Johnson expanded. “We’re about to launch ‘on my radar’, which is basically the Facebook newsfeed applied to geography. We’ve been working with Yahoo and their new location technology Fire Eagle. It lets you enter your location and get back all the conversations happening within a certain radius. You can zoom out to see the whole neighborhood, the city, etc. So new tools can amplify what local experts on the ground have been doing traditionally by word of mouth."

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