VentureBeat

Local news and content site Outside.in is launching a tool this week called Radar, which filters news based on both distance and relevance to better zero in on local news that people will find personally meaningful.

Outside.in is a local site that’s trying to succeed where former competitors Judy’s Book and Backfence failed. Such sites, which pull in news, blog postings, commentary and other content from local sites, haven’t really taken off for a number of reasons, including having too little content and returning news that doesn’t mean anything to you (example: football scores from a highschool that’s nowhere near you).

Radar, the new tool, is a personal portal that returns content based on levels of proximity to your location. It pulls in news in a timeline that looks very similar to Facebook’s Feed, but is also split into three sections determined by geographical distance.

This may mean, for example, news by my block, news by neighborhood and news for the whole city. However, the categories aren’t set in stone, because people in a different area — a suburb of Kansas City, for instance — might have a very different population density, and want return news according to county or quarter.

The idea is to simultaneously give you as much local news as possible, while also filtering out the really irrelevant parts. For instance, while I might care about construction on my own street, I really don’t care about construction going on a few blocks away. So with Radar, I’ll get that news for my street, while the neighborhood view will filter out all the construction and instead tell me about the film showing in the local park or a blog post about a new restaurant opening.

Outside.in is moving in the right direction for their content — they’ve got a clean, easy to navigate site and it looks like they’re doing a good job of focusing in on meaningful local content, with tools like Radar. However, unless you live in a city like New York or San Francisco or in a particularly active community, it can still be difficult to find enough content to make the site useful.

The site’s co-founder, John Geraci, thinks that’s changing quickly. Sites like Judy’s Book failed because they were too early, he says. “There wasn’t enough of the Web 2.0, “everyone is an author thing happening then,” he says. “But now journalists are on the web, every newspaper has an RSS feed, and there’s more stuff to work with.”

In addition, the site is thinking about tying in with other services. For example, they might let Twitter feeds from community members come up in the feed, in effect letting entire communities Twitter to each other.

I’ll have more later this week on another local site, Topix, which has a different idea of how to handle local news.

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.