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StoryMaps!

It's an exciting day at outside.in: we're going live with our StoryMaps, the first of many tools that we're going to be offering local bloggers and publishers as part of our GeoToolkit. This is the StoryMap for stevenberlinjohnson.com:

Maps of blog posts or news stories are not new of course, but we think these StoryMaps are going to be very popular for a couple of reasons:

1. There's no need to add geo data manually to create the map. Just sign up for Geotoolkit, submit your feed, and we'll start detecting places in your posts automatically. (If we miss something, you can easily add place data with our feed management tools.)

2. For each place on the map, we include the place name and address, plus up to three stories from your archive, so you can see the history of what you've written about that location.

3. Users can change the time-scale on the fly -- seeing only the last week's worth of stories, or taking a big gulp and seeing six months.

You can already see StoryMaps live at some great local sites around the web, like DC's New Columbia Heights blog; NYC's superb local site, Gothamist; and Brooklyn's own Flatbush Gardener.

We're going to be adding new features to these maps in the coming months, along with some excellent new tools that we have in the pipeline. For me, the most exciting thing about this is that it's our first big step beyond simply being a destination site for people interested in information about their communities; outside.in is now becoming a platform for anyone -- from bloggers to local newspapers to national media -- who wants to participate in building out the geo-web. I'll be talking about this a bit today at my Web 2.0 talk with Chris Tolles from Topix, so be sure to swing by if you're at the conference. And the rest of you -- go build your own StoryMap!

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Comments

When you switch to other cities, which are hosted on stage.outside.in you get a google maps key error message.

I Like your site very much.
I hope today is a lucky day.

What a great idea, I'll definitely be checking it out. Geo-tagging is totally the new black ;-)

Excellent idea. I'll try it.

what a fantastic tool...the site is no nice and useful too

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    The Basics

    • I'm a father of three boys, husband of one wife, and author of five books. In early 2007 I went and foolishly got myself a day job running the hyperlocal community site, outside.in that I co-founded the year before. We spend most of the year in Park Slope, Brooklyn, though I'm on the road a lot giving talks. (You can see the full story here.) Personal correspondence should go to sbj6668 at earthlink dot net. Media requests should go to Matthew.Venzon at us.penguingroup dot com. If you're interested in having me speak at an event, drop a line to Wesley Neff at the Leigh Bureau (WesN at Leighbureau dot com.)

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      Interface Culture : How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate
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