Updated with full list of names of angel investors
How do you build the perfect local community Web site — with news, events, comments and more?
If you manage to, it will be a grand slam. It becomes the talk of the town, people spend more time going there, and local advertisers spend money there.
A wave of companies have tried, but failed. But Outside.in, a new Brooklyn, NY start-up is looking very good — as good, if not better than any we’ve seen so far. Its visual presentation is nice and simple (see screenshot at bottom). It uses AJAX and other technologies to improve upon efforts preceding it.
Here’s the background: Newspapers have largely dropped the ball. A dozen or so Internet companies have tried to adapt the community concept online, but none have nailed it. There’s Yelp, which specializes in reviews of bars and restaurants. There’s Judysbook, which began with a broader community feel, but has since moved toward shopping. There’s Insiderpages, which is struggling, and focused on business listings. Smalltown focuses on local business, too. Topix gives you community news. Backfence gets closer, as does ePodunk to coverage of wider community events — but their execution and user interfaces have remained unimpressive. Craigslist provides a local marketplace, but stops there.
Outside.in takes both existing content (from local bloggers, city governments, movie listings) and user generated content, and packages them into local sites.
For each town, Outside.in lets you see stories, comments, places and “neighbors,” or registered users. It has one useful, powerful feature we haven’t seen before: You can switch the focus of your region easily — using a map feature at the top left of your region. This lets you zoom in or out to include more or less surrounding regions or cities — and the information, news, events and comments all adjust in real time.
So you can limit a search for crime to Park Slope, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY. Then you can search for Italian restaurants across the entire city. Or you can look for poetry readings in Park Slope and surrounding neighborhoods. All by just scrolling within a map.
There’s a lot to look at here. Outside.in provides a URL for each city (it adds a +1 to the URL if you zoom out and see a mile of surrounding area, etc), but also for each place. For example, there’s an entry for the Whole Foods in Brooklyn, which is under development, and creating considerable community debate. People can go to the URL and see the latest stories by local bloggers, and can submit their own comments.
In this way, Outside.in wants to be a Wikipedia for local places. How does it monitor the comments and entries? Well, like Wikipedia, it has the crowd controllers. Of its eight full-time employees, three are chaperoning the site, and 12 more freelancers are helping out.
It is early days, and it is a little buggy. For example, in Palo Alto, Calif., some “top places” are actually based in places like Mountain View (in part, because Outside.in is still figuring out how to deal with regions like the Bay Area where cities merge into each other, and because it wants to show places with buzz within ten miles from you).
Founder Steven Johnson gave us a demo today. He was the co-founder of the online magazine FEED and community site, Plastic.com.
Hollywood producer Andy Karsch, and John Seely Brown seed-funded the company with $200,000. Yesterday, the company announced it raised $900,000 more from Union Square Ventures, Milestone, Village Ventures and individuals Marc Andreessen (Netscape co-founder), Esther Dyson, George Crowley, John Borthwick and Richard Smith.
This will be fun to watch. We’ve been waiting for a decent site to come along. While Outside.in has a long way to go, it is looking very smart.
16 Comments
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C said:
I don’t htink I saw an ad when I visited the site. What is the monetization strategy?
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TPeters said:
Pretty much every click and you’re off-site. Even IF the sites manage to gain traction in their local markets, there really isn’t any inventory to sell. If I were the dominant local media in the communities they serve, I’d send them a nice bottle of bubbly. If Outside.in succeeds all they will manage to do is drive more users to the sites they reference = more inventory for THOSE sites. Next….?
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C said:
yeah seriously, this website does nothing that I probably couldn’t do with my Netvibes account.
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Miguel said:
These cookie-cutter sites that scrape content do nothing for me. There’s nothing there, except some random blog headlines, that evokes a feeling of community. Bleh.
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Derek Scruggs said:
I suspect their ultimate monetization strategy will be to re-syndicate this content to local newspapers. Scripps is already having some success licensing their YourHub.com technology. It wouldn’t surprise me to see them buy/partner with Outside.in
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TPeters said:
Wait… re-syndicate content to whom? The vast majority of the legitimate content being produced already belongs to local newspapers and TV stations. You’re saying they will buy it back from Outside.in??? Local portals like these will not happen until the major media players in a given market decide to make it happen. They have the content, they have the online distribution and they have the sales forces.
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cg said:
I don’t see an entrenched local newspaper wanting to buy most of the crap on Outside.in anyway. When I went to my city, there was absolutely nothing of value there. Too many of these VC people think that just because a site has good “local” content in Silicon Valley, that it’s a great national product. Nothing could be further from reality.
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Cindy said:
Why ePodunk is so much better than outside.in:
1) Lists OVER 46,000 communities (not 63 cities)
2) Lets users blog and review communities on the local blog section.. so if you don’t have a blog of your own, you can still weigh in on local issues.
3) ePodunk ACTUALLY DOES THEIR OWN RESEARCH. Trust me, I’ve emailed them. ouside.in provides literally no content of their own. At ePodunk you can read about a town’s history, quirks, see what movies are filmed there, find out which famous residents have lived there etc. etc..Outside.in is reguritating local news. That’s it. I can’t believe they claim to promote online “community” and “neighbors” since if you are from a small town, you’re even not on outside.in’s radar. So, if you living in one of their selected communities.. you can read the news. Not quite exciting. End of story.
So if you say ePodunk “gets closer” to being a site that nails the online community idea.. maybe you haven’t visited in a while!
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Duncan Gough said:
It’s an interesting problem, building a community takes real skill and fragmenting your audience into location sensitive groups makes the job even harder. I setup ecolocal (www.ecolocal.com) with much the same premise, and soon found that local news and events are so few and far between that it’s hard to gain any serious traction. As our site has grown it’s less of an issue, but there are bigger sites our there that offer location based content who still struggle to keep hold of their community.
As much as local news online is going to take off eventually, and maybe even replace traditional local newspapers, it’s going to take old-fashioned methods to do it. If you want to build a local community online, then you need to get out into the health clubs, coffee shops and newsagents to talk to people, hand out flyers and get that word of mouth. Start in the areas you know and build up from there.
If anyone knows the phrase ‘internology’, you’ll know just what I mean :)
http://www.goodold.se/blog/trend/2006/09/21/new-media-strategies-according-to-rob-curley/
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Ed Kohler said:
Pretty much every click and you’re off-site. Even IF the sites manage to gain traction in their local markets, there really isn’t any inventory to sell.
Yeah, sounds like the same problem Google has. :-)
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Richard Ault said:
Metroblogging, 53 cities, 16 countries, 650+ people contributing to the sites. It’s also been around for over 2 years. Perfect model, not yet, but getting closer every day.
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tercüme said:
These cookie-cutter sites that scrape content do nothing for me. There’s nothing there, except some random blog headlines, that evokes a feeling of community. :)
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Martin said:
I suspect their ultimate monetization strategy will be to re-syndicate this content to local newspapers.
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shawfactor said:
I think the approach taken by localHero is far superior: http://localhero.biz/
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