Exploring neighbourhood via outside.in
The list of location aware services grows every day. I have special interest on those services which aims at reducing the gap between human geospatial thinking and computer machine reasoning. I bring a nice example today, outside.in project.
An important percentage of worthwhile information for us is located near our home, or work place. That is our neighbourhood. But there exists a long distance between people who provide that information, and people who consume it. For instance, the street where we live could be closed for traffic because of an accident or for some repairs. Perhaps we are lucky and our council notifies to all citizens affected on time. Alice in wonderland. Most of times we’ll get notice when we take the car.
There are hundreds of examples: an special offer in our supermarket, a party in a bar near hour home, the birthday of hour neighbour, etc. etc. Sometimes interested people try to give us that information, but sometimes this is not posible. And this problem becomes bigger as the number of information sources also increases.
Outside.in project focuses on this problematic. They propose a web page where people can access information of their neighbourhood in an easy way, choosing the city + state, the neighbourhood and the city or just a zip code. Then you access to a map with the last news. Let’s see an example from Brookline neighbourhood, in Boston:
And for information providers, the mechanism is easy. You have just to add your blog to Outside.in, and submit content to it directly from your blog. There are four ways to indicate that your post has an specific location:
- Placing a link to a Google Map anywhere within a story.
- A piece of content tagged with a zip code.
- Using the where tag.
- Using GeoRSS (obviously the best).
A great article talking about this idea.
But we have bad news, It’s designed just for the USA for the time being.We’ll have to wait (or we’ll have to develop) to see it in Europe.
January 10th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
Mapufacture is another personalizable geospatial aggregator that works world wide. You can submit GeoRSS or KML feeds from blogs, MyMaps, flickr, and then build maps from feeds and blogs you like, or just get a general map for your area.
The great thing about standards of geospatial content like GeoRSS is that it empowers users to mix and match content as they like.
January 10th, 2008 at 7:36 pm
Thanks for the link. There are more web which allows to mix feeds from blogs. It also can be easily made in Wordpress with GeoRSS feed sources.
But I think the work of outside.in is specially well focused and also implemented, with a kind of tag clustering that simplifies the navigation.