Digital Media Buzz > Forget Yellow: Go Local With These Latest Technologies

Forget Yellow: Go Local With These Latest Technologies

By Thursday Bram

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The amount of content available online is incredible, especially when you consider that most people just want information relevant to their own needs — if a person searches for a restaurant, he or she wants to find one within easy driving distance, rather than one in the next state over. Hyperlocal technologies fill that need, especially for publications online. By being able to provide geographically relevant content (along with related ads), a publisher can offer more value to a reader. But the mechanics of creating such technology are not so simple. The developmental work that goes into hyperlocal technology can be considerable.

Mark Josephson is the CEO of Outside.in, a site dedicated to offering hyperlocal information based on neighborhood, zip code or city. Using the tools that help Outside.in’s own site provide information, his company offers publishers the ability to build hyperlocal news sources, with content discovered by Outside.in. The tools also automatically map content from bloggers and help them tag, organize and promote stories that may be of interest only to a small geographic area.

Outside.in provides hyperlocal content for thousands of websites and reaches more than 5 million users each month. To reach that end, though, Outside.in does not work primarily with content. “Our team is primarily made up of engineers,” Josephson says. “Outside.in for Publishers is a self-service tool that allows anyone to create new pages for each neighborhood in their local market in less than 10 minutes.” As much of the tool set offered by Outside.in is automated: even content is automatically collected and organized. That feature and the fact that it significantly reduces the amount of time and money a publisher might need to spend on creating and collecting hyperlocal content is becoming a vital part of many hyperlocal tools.

Allowing existing sites to easily add hyperlocal content is one of the key areas of development many companies are working on. GenGreenLife is one such company that runs one of the largest databases of green businesses and organizations in North America, with more than 60,000 companies in its system, says CEO Charisse McAuliffe. “Our platform is based off of a geo-IP system that identifies where a person is coming from and delivers up environmental resources closest to a individual.” McAuliffe started the company because her own online searches just weren’t providing her with the geographically relevant information she needed — in her case, even repeated searches couldn’t help her find a solar panel company in her area, despite the fact several companies nearby offered such services.

GenGreenLife was originally built on a content model: the team would create individual resources for each city in an area, researching information on environmental programs. It was a long process and readers had to search through the content on the basis of their zip code or city. McAuliffe says its system can easily adapt to new technologies as they become available. “First, it was important to move away from the hub city/zip code platform to the Geo-IP software that is available. Now that GPS technology is available and we are able to leverage it for things like our iPhone application ‘Find Green,’ it just gets us even more excited for the future,” she says.

A relatively recent development at GenGreenLife was the creation of an API (application programming interface) that allows companies like National Geographic to integrate data from GenGreenLife’s databases into their own websites. Many developers are pursuing such options for integration — there can be technical difficulties with creating a system that works well on a wide variety of websites, but APIs are speeding up that process, allowing publishers to easily integrate information.

Josephson raises an interesting point when discussing the future of hyperlocal technology: “Local is intensely personal; Everyone defines their local differently; For some it’s their town or zip; For others it includes where they grew up or where their office is.” As tools continue to develop and improve, even how hyperlocal is defined may become a part of the features necessary to offer.”