stevenberlinjohnson.com

Searching The "Small Here"

In his essay introducing The Long Now Foundation, Brian Eno tells the story of visiting a wealthy friend in her downtown loft, in an otherwise destitute Manhattan neighborhood circa 1978:

I just didn't understand. Why would anyone spend so much money building a place like that in a neighbourhood like this? Later I got into conversation with the hostess. "Do you like it here?" I asked. "It's the best place I've ever lived", she replied. "But I mean, you know, is it an interesting neighbourhood?" "Oh ? the neighbourhood? Well-- that's outside!" she laughed.

The incident stuck in my mind. How could you live so blind to your surroundings? How could you not think of "where I live" as including at least some of the space outside your four walls, some of the bits you couldn't lock up behind you? I felt this was something particular to New York: I called it "The Small Here". I realised that, like most Europeans, I was used to living in a bigger Here.

Part of Eno's point is that what we mean by "here" has a sliding scale to it. Sometimes "here" is the room you're sitting in; sometimes it's your block; sometimes it's your neighborhood; sometimes it's the Greater Metropolitan Area. We make those spatial adjustments all the time without thinking about it. When we're looking for a paperclip nearby, the "here" is even smaller than Eno's friend's; but when we're looking for a new apartment, the scope widens dramatically.

The trouble is that fluid sense of "here" hasn't entirely migrated online yet. Search doesn't yet reflect those shifting definitions of where we are, the true radius of our interest. Yes, you can search a map at Google or Bing or on your iPhone--along with a thousand other directory sites. But those results are almost exclusively made up of businesses: restaurants, dry cleaners, doctors. In fact, that kind of query is so dominant that it has become the standard definition of "local search." If you're doing local search, you're looking for a dentist or a car mechanic.

Ever since we launched the first public alpha of outside.in exactly three years ago, we've been animated by the idea that the quest for a good dry cleaner was going to be just one facet of local search. Our Radar feature, for instance, let you see all the news and blog posts and tweets within a thousand feet of any location in the U.S. But even Radar wasn't search proper, because you couldn't easily change the scale of the geographic query, and you couldn't restrict your search to a specific set of keywords.

For the past six months, our team has been working incredibly hard on an entirely new platform for outside.in, one that allows true geographic search at lightning speed. It went live on the site late last week. Now every page at outside.in contains two search fields: "what" and "where." This lets you do all kinds of queries that are impossible on other platforms that aren't natively aware of geography. You can do Radar-style queries: show me everything related to "crime" or "playgrounds" within one mile of my home address. You can search an entire neighborhood: "music" or "condos" in Adams Morgan, DC. You can search an entire city for the latest mass transit developments. Or if you're just looking for a nearby Italian restaurant, or a good pediatrician, you can do that as well.

You can see the dramatic difference this makes when you compare results for the same query at outside.in, Google, and Google News. Let's say you're looking for the latest news or conversation about real estate in Boston's Back Bay neighborhood. Type that query into outside.in, and this is what you see:

We've got more than 300 stories on this topic, with multiple stories from the past few days, many of which don't even mention the phrase "Back Bay." If it's a story about a building in Back Bay -- the Hancock Tower, for instance -- our system understands that the story belongs in the Back Bay neighborhood, even though the original text doesn't use the phrase. 

Search Google with the same query and you get this:

The first six results might as well be ads: they're all just the home pages for real estate agents in the neighborhood. (Nothing wrong with that, of course: some people may indeed be looking for real estate agents.) Only the 7th result is an actual news story about Back Bay, which explicitly mentions the phrase "Back Bay" in the title. But of course, when you're searching geographically, you're not necessarily interested in the concept of Back Bay, you're interested in all the things contained by the region of Back Bay. Keyword-based indexing only gets you so far. You have to include geography in the index for the system to mirror the way we intuitively think about location. It's like asking your neighbor what the scoop is on local schools in Park Slope, and having him restrict his answer only to schools that include the word "Park" or "Slope" in their names.

You can see the limitations of non-geo search most clearly when you search Google News for the same query. You get more timely stories, of course, but more than half of them have nothing to do with Back Bay. The number one result happens to include the word "back" alongside the phrase "real estate."

Needless to say, if you're interested in an even smaller "here," and want to search for "crime" or "music" news around your exact home address, both Google and Google News just break down entirely. But thanks to our experience with Radar, we perform that kind of search as easily as we do any other geographic query.

Right now, outside.in geographic search is only available on our core site, but you should expect to see it rolled out soon out soon to the media partners and bloggers using our Outside.in For Publishers and Geo-Toolkit platforms. Yes, some markets have more data than others, and you'll find occasional errors in our geo-tagging -- and of course, for the time being we are U.S.-only. But this platform is going to incredibly fun to build on in the coming months and years. And, needless to say, all the advantages of true geographic search are going to be equally appealing to local advertisers, who have their own sliding definitions of what "here" means.

So whatever size your "here" happens to be, you can now search it at outside.in.

 

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.

Outside.in looking for a CTO

It's been a very good six months at outside.in. We've launched Radar, our GeoToolkit platform, and just yesterday rolled out our API. And we're starting to see our traffic numbers really take off at an amazing rate: our core site audience has grown 400% this year; more than a thousand bloggers and media sites are now using our tools as part of the outside.in network (and it's only about two months old!) And we've got some great new tools and services in the short-term pipeline...

Of course, that kind of rapid growth creates a new set of challenges, most of them revolving around scaling. To date, our amazing co-founder and CTO Cory Forsyth has done a tremendous job creating the whole outside.in ecosystem, from the core site to the network tools to the admin system. But we know that there are big performance and scaling issues involved in building an architecture that can support massive traffic, and play a critical role in the evolving geo-web across tens of thousands of network partners. Putting all that together is a job in itself.

So we're looking for a CTO who has extensive experience building web applications with that level of usage who will work alongside Cory (he'll become our VP of Engineering.) It's a great gig, with lots of fun challenges and about as enjoyable an office environment as you could imagine. Our CEO Mark Josephson has a blog post here that talks about the job in more detail, but if you're interested drop a line to jobs@outside.in with your resume or LinkedIn profile.

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!

Radar Knows Where The iPhones Are

Here's a cool little example of why I think Radar is such a great product. I came in to town yesterday for 24 hours—we're spending the rest of the summer out on Shelter Island—to do a couple of meetings, including one this morning on 57th Street. My plan was to do the meeting, then pop over to the Apple Store and buy a new iPhone 3G. Before I left for the meeting, I typed the address I was headed towards—9 West 57th Street—into Radar, just to see what was in the "1,000 foot view." (In part because I was thinking I might show a live Radar feed in the meeting.)

And what shows up at the very top of my Radar? A link to this story from Racked, talking about the 3-4 hour lines at the Apple Store on 5th Ave, with a photo of  yesterday's insane morning line. One look at that page, and my morning plans were changed.

There are bunch of cool things worth noting about this particular use case:

First, given my objectives for the morning, that Racked story was probably the single most relevant piece of information that I could have seen right before I left for midtown. And Radar had it at the top of the feed. Nice!

Second, this is a classic example of the utility of networked journalism. Sure, Racked is not exactly unearthing political corruption here, or exposing dangerous conditions at the mill. But it's providing information that's genuinely useful, that traditional sources don't provide.  The Times isn't going to cover the iPhone line ten days after the launch, and while the Apple site updates store availability nightly, it reports nothing about line length. But this is exactly the kind of thing Racked is brilliant at covering. (Nice, Lockhart!)

Third, note that I didn't even have to type a search term into Radar ("iPhone lines") to get this information. My only filter was my exact location. That doesn't always work quite this perfectly, of course, but it shows you the power of the 1,000-ft view as a way of determining relevance without any other hint from the user.

Now if I could somehow program Radar to actually wait in the line for me...

Radar Is Live

I'm really excited to report that we launched Radar today, the most significant addition to outside.in since we first put up our alpha site 20 months ago.

The list of cool things you can do with Radar is long, but I think the basic premise is pretty simple and intuitive. Tell us where you are, and Radar shows you what's happening around you, at increasing levels of zoom: the 1000-foot scale, the neighborhood scale, the city scale, and "Everywhere Else" in the U.S. (Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while will recognize the zooming concept.) Right now, we're tracking blog posts, news stories, outside.in discussions, and Twitter tweets, and organizing them all both around specific places and topics. You'll see more content -- and more kinds of content -- flowing through your Radar in the coming months.

One of the things I love about Radar is that you track can specific places: schools, real estate developments, playgrounds. We'll "star" any item that comes in about that particular place, and if you happen to to be zoomed in on a location far from that place, we'll make sure that the item shows up in the "Everywhere Else" zoom level.

You can see two key ideas at work here, both of which are central to our philosophy about what hyperlocal means. The first is that to date hyperlocal hasn't been local enough. Yes, it's nice to see news filtered by your zip code or your town, but there are more immediate zones that matter even more than that. A deli closing within five hundred feet of my house matters a lot to me; a deli closing ten blocks away is pretty much meaningless. (This is the Pothole Paradox I wrote about last year.) The thousand-foot-view lets you zoom in on precisely that zone of core interest. This is one of the concepts that drove us to create dedicated Place pages for hundreds of thousands of places around the country a year ago; Radar takes all that information and makes it immediately easy to parse.

The other big idea about local is that people care about specific places that are, in some cases, scattered all around the world. I'm fascinated by the Hudson Yards and High Line development projects in Manhattan, and so I've set up my Radar to track those specific places, even though I live in another borough. I don't see all the hyperlocal news from Manhattan's neighborhoods in my Radar, but I do see every mention of Hudson Yards and the High Line.

The underlying principle here is that hyperlocal is all about places that are geographically close to you and emotionally close to you. Radar lets you see it all. So go check it out...

Baton Passing

It's almost two years to the day since I originally decided to put together a team and raise a little money to build outside.in, after the gentle prodding of my friends (and now outside.in board members) Andy Karsch and Mark Bailey. At the time, the idea was that I would help put together a prototype, and make a couple of early hires, and then if things seemed promising, we'd find a real CEO to run it, and I'd go back to writing the next book, which I was already under contract to write for Riverhead.

Obviously, that didn't exactly go according to plan -- though for excellent reasons. The site quickly got way too interesting, and the people I was working with (my co-creator John Geraci and our super-talented CTO Cory Forsyth, and then our first wave of investors and early employees) were all just too stimulating to hand off to a new CEO. And the fact was I couldn't really get the problems we were trying to solve out of my head -- even if I'd wanted to go back to writing a new book. So my tenure as CEO ended up lasting much longer than I had intended. And though I did in fact finally start writing the new book a few months ago (more about that in another post), I had convinced myself that I could run a 20-person company and write a book at the same.

But then I got introduced to Mark Josephson, who was at the time president of the ad network company Seavast, and who had helped build About.com before that. We hit it off very quickly, and it was immediately clear to me that he would bring a set of skills and experience to the CEO job that I didn't have, skills that in many ways were more suited to where outside.in was in its evolution as a business. Fortunately for us, he saw a similar opportunity in outside.in, and a few weeks ago he officially joined us as CEO. We're announcing it today, along with a $3 million round of financing that we just closed on Monday.

My new role at outside.in will be as an active Executive Chairman -- I'm still very much involved in the day-to-day business, but trying to leave open the mornings for writing. If all goes well, you'll see a steady flow of new features and partnerships from outside.in through the year, and then a new book from me in early 2009. So good news all around!

Are You A Gifted Interface Designer? Come Work At Outside.In!

We're actively looking for a lead designer at outside.in right now. As you might imagine, this is an incredibly cool job. Yes, there's opportunity to work with a great group of people at a growing company with fantastic investors and partners, in a sweet DUMBO office. But more importantly, it's the opportunity to help invent the interface conventions for the geographic web. We've got some pretty exceptional new products and ideas in the pipeline here, and some great partners who are going to help us showcase what we're doing. But we need someone to turn all the geo-data we're assembling into a compelling and intuitive design, building on the great UI work that Doria Fan has done for us over the past year. Ideally, this person would be NYC-based. If you're interested drop us a line at jobs@outside.in.

Outside.In Lets People Use The Internet To Communicate With Each Other!

So we finally launched discussion boards at outside.in. It's taken us a while, but I'm really excited about the way we've put them together. As you might imagine, we've built discussion boards with state-of-the-art geo-targeting that happens pretty much transparently. My colleague John Geraci wrote a great post about this on the outside.in blog:

Discussion threads get associated with each individual place they reference.  So, say you’re talking about the evictions that just took place at 475 Kent Avenue in Brooklyn.  If that place has been referenced before in our system, the discussion boards will detect it and associate your post with the outside.in page for that place. If it’s not in our system, we invite you to give it a place manually (which takes about ten seconds), and thereafter it IS in our system as a place, with your Discussion post attached. All of these different levels of locality then stack up vertically - place, neighborhood and city all nested together. So if you post a question about a restaurant in Hayes Valley, SF, it not only shows up on the Hayes Valley discussion board, it shows up on the San Francisco discussion board, as well as on the page of the restaurant itself - where other people interested in that restaurant can find it and learn from it, or post their own response to it. In other words, the conversation gets indexed at all of the different levels of zoom that are relevant to it.

As John mentions, we're automatically detecting place and neighborhood names in the posts, and geo-tagging the posts appropriately based on those associations.  (And we built a brain-dead-simple UI for adding a place manually.) It's a pretty cool system.

Of course, online discussion boards take time to build, so we're trying to seed the conversation a bit by asking questions of the entire outside.in community. (We're calling these outside.inquiries.) The first one is pretty fun: "What local building would you most like to demolish?" (I went with the Atlantic Center Mall.)

So if you've got a chance, go check out our Discussions -- and even better, jump into a thread.

Outside.in and The Washington Post

This morning we announced our new partnership with the Washington Post: our buzzmaps for the DC area are now live on the Post site. As you'll see, these maps are variations of the buzzmaps we've created for all the bloggers in our system: they're tracking all the places that local bloggers are discussing in the DC area, and mapping the top ten places based on overall volume over the past week. But of course it's not just about the map; there are links to all stories from the blogosphere about each place, along with links to the place pages themselves at outside.in.

One thing that's important to note: we're also tracking Washington Post content as well. (If the Post has an article about a place in the top ten, you'll see an orange slice in that placemarker on the map.) So in this relatively simple page, a number of cool and interrelated things are happening:

First, we're strengthening the ties between the local bloggers and the Washington Post. (Our investor Fred Wilson talks about this a little today on his blog.) The Post gets a easy way of integrating blog content onto its pages, and the  blogs get traffic from -- and the fun of appearing on -- the Washington Post's pages.

Secondly, we're not just geographically organizing the blogger content -- we're organizing the Post's content. That's because our system is designed to track geographically pretty much anything that outputs a feed. So building a map like this for another newspaper, in another city, takes us about five minutes. (You can see where we are heading with this.)

Thirdly, it's an extremely distributed system. We're not just creating a page that shows you information about a neighborhood (though of course we do that at outside.in.) We're connecting stories from dozens of bloggers, from a newspaper site, from our own  database of places in the DC area, and from Google's map API -- and we're putting it up on someone else's site, not our own.

The other thing that's exciting about this deal -- and I hope it's just the beginning -- is that we're working with the Washington Post, which is not only one of the top newspapers in the country, but also a true leader in their local coverage online. (Their local explorer maps, for instance, are very cool.) So congrats to the team at outside.in and at The Post for making it happen!