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OIP and the news ecosystem

Today's an exciting day at outside.in: we're rolling out the beta release of Outside.in for Publishers, a suite of tools for organizing and curating hyperlocal news pages for US cities and towns. There's a great post from our CEO Mark Josephson here explaining the service and the vision behind it. A few months ago I gave a talk at SXSW talking about the ways in which the news business was moving towards an ecosystem model.

OIP is our bid to help make that ecosystem healthier and more diverse: by giving consumers easier access to far more content about their communities; by giving publishers a more cost-efficient means of creating local content optimized for local advertisers; and by promoting the neighborhood bloggers that are inventing a whole new model of hyperlocal reporting.

Since we started rolling out these neighborhood pages for media partners six months ago, outside.in's audience has skyrocketed from 1 million monthly uniques to nearly 5 million. The launch of Outside.in for Publishers should accelerate that growth. And of course, this is only the beginning: we have a great list of new features in the pipeline for publishers, bloggers, and even local advertisers.

Me On Twitter On TIME On Twitter

This week's cover of TIME features a story that I wrote about Twitter and innovation. Actually, that's not quite right: this week's cover features a tweet that I posted about the cover story I wrote for TIME about Twitter. I've been chuckling about this cover ever since the folks at TIME proposed it. What I love is that we actually synced everything up so that the cover shows an actual word-for-word tweet that I posted this morning, right before TIME's Rick Stengel revealed the cover on Morning Joe. We had one version where it also showed my current lat-long from my iPhone location, and we were contemplating having the location be something funny, as a little easter egg for the geo-nerds, but I think the final version came out better the way it is.

I called my Dad to tell him about it this morning, and his -- typically droll -- response was, "Well, that's a pretty roundabout way to get your face on the cover of Time."

It's hard to write about Twitter right now, because obviously so much is being said about it, but I tried to use the piece both to explain some of the new attributes of Twitter that have become visible in the past half-year (particularly revolving around search), and at the same use Twitter as a case study in how innovation increasingly happens today. The original draft had about an even balance between the two, but in the edits the piece became a bit more focused on Twitter itself and how we have started using it. I think those were smart changes to make, but there was some material that got cut on Columbia professor Amar Bhidé's super-interesting idea of "venturesome consumption"  that I will try to resurrect elsewhere.