Now, it's going live with exclusive use at The Columbian for coverage of Southwest Washington and the entire Portland metropolitan area. For now, only the staff's information is posted; before year's end the plan is to open a map for citizen to add their news, images, video geocoded based on their phone's tools. (see current map) GeoMonkey received $1 million in "angel" funding and holds a few patents on its Google Maps-based solution.

I hate to be a crumudgeon regarding the news use of maps, but I don't want to read my news this way! I've never looked more than once at any of the hyperlocal mapped news sites (and there are many). This implementation is ok and I'm curious how the citizen-generated content will work out. For now, if I had to vote on any of these implementations, I'd go with EveryBlock with its open source code and continued efforts to add more sources to its handful of supported cities.

As for the community mapping solution, it's ok (though I was disappointed not to find a single intro video to explain the whole thing), but many other services can make the same kind of thing possible - I'm thinking of Platial, Brightkite among others. I'm not yet sure how this is fundamentally different or better.

- Columbian.com