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YourStreet & Hyperlocal News

By Josh Brown ⋅ October 30, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment

Here’s a cool new site I found last night that has some potential functionality. It’s called YourStreet. If you’re like me, you don’t read the paper anymore and rely almost exclusively on web media for your daily news. But most sites that I read our national and international. There aren’t many local alternatives without having to go to the main Atlanta site and go about 7 levels deep to your specific county and then city before you can even start to find the news that is pertinent to your local community.

The site is basically a mash-up of Google Maps and an algorithm that extracts geographical information from stories, such as street names, neighborhoods, and cities. It then geo-codes the articles against a longitude and latitude database so that it can place them on a map.

Again, this is in the same vein of what I discussed last week with geotags and metadata. So instead of me going to the news now . . . the news comes to me contextually and locally. If you don’t get fired up about this . . . then as my old Baptist preacher would say . . . your wood is wet.

As you can see below it pulls the news from your specific location and you can even pull the RSS feed from your specific location. I’m not sure how well this will work in more rural areas. It looks like the news is even kind of sparse for my area.

But you can see the way in which the web is changing. And how tagging information with metadata is creating a whole new web.