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October 24, 2006
outside.in + open geodata rant @11:28 AM
This is definitely the most interesting content aggregator I’ve seen in quite some time, mostly because it takes Local Content - mainly posts from local bloggers - and doesn’t try and just plop it on a map. Outside in realizes that the content is the critical thing, and that the location information is secondary - a way to filter a wealth of information into more managible chunks. As far as I can tell, the geo-location of posts is all done via zip code trickery, and some posts are tagged with numerous zip codes. A post I found from Curbed.LA for instance, is associated with 3 zipcodes, even though the post refers to a pretty specific area. Basically, it’ll do local filtering, but it’s not going to get you super close to things. In my mind, the map interface that’s up there, which makes it magically mashed up , is more or less without warrant because it’s an inefficient way of simply trying to change zipcodes.
Overall, I think the premise is totally spot on, if not totally obvious: blog posts should be geotagged according to the subject of the post, not the location of the blogger. My critique would be that the design is really not so great, in that it feels claustrophobic (for a portal site like this, the design should be more welcoming). The other main thing is that the data is not transparant, not even exposed by RSS feeds. Of course, I would say that’s an area where something like geotagthings has a leg up on this, even though it don’t have a super great portal design, or a wealth of automagically derived content.
for more, keep reading the full post here.
posted by will | comments (0) | 
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