stevenberlinjohnson.com

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!

Potholes and the Geo Web

We have a very cool new site design that's slowly rolling out this week at outside.in (along with an entirely new database architecture and other back-end refinements), and given that it's almost exactly a year since we launched the original prototype, I thought it was about time I tried to write out some of my thinking about the geographic web as it has evolved over that time. So I've written a little essay called "The Pothole Paradox: Why Building The Geographic Web Is Hard, and Why It's Worth Doing":

The idea of requiring geographic metadata for information might strike some people as excessive, but I suspect in a few years we will look back at the first decade of the web and be amazed that we went for so long without it. Think about it this way: both email and the Web depend on standardized location information embedded in every document -- we call them email and Web "addresses" for a reason. It's a virtual location, of course, but without that universally recognized location data, the last fifteen years of online innovation would have never happened.

We are also increasingly standardizing metadata for time. One of the things that is not commonly said about the blogging revolution is that it has introduced machine-readable time stamps for billions of web pages. One of the things that made Blogger such a breakthrough product was not that it made it easy to put up a web page and publish your thoughts -- home page building tools had been doing that for years -- but rather the fact that it let you publish a reverse chronological list of your thoughts.

So we have widely adopted metadata for virtual location and for time. We just haven't made the same breakthrough for real-world location. This has resulted in a strange imbalance in the way we interact with information on our screens, and in our expectations about what should be readily available to us.

Anyhow, there's a lot there, so check it out and let me know what you think!

OpenSocial

A few quick thoughts about OpenSocial. As you can see here, outside.in is one of the launch partners for the OpenSocial platform. In fact, our developer Christian Niles was out at the GooglePlex earlier this week for a last minute Hackathon before the announcement. We're going to have much more to say about our OpenSocial application in the coming weeks, but obviously the great promise here lies in combining those two big mega-themes of the past few years: the social graph (as you're now obliged to call it) and the geo-web.

Interestingly, we did not know until a few days ago that the APIs would extend to other social network platforms -- our guess was that it would live inside of Orkut, but that Orkut would become more tightly integrated with other Google applications, like Gmail. Obviously, we're thrilled that the platform is going to be as inclusive as it is. And what a brilliant move by Google. (I suppose as a launch partner, I'm biased, but still: what a brilliant move.) That $15 billion Facebook valuation got a lot of abuse over the past few weeks, but in a way I thought it made sense. Obviously, there was risk involved, but if you thought that Facebook had a reasonable shot at becoming "the social operating system of the Web", then it was probably worth making the bet -- particularly given that Microsoft had other reasons to invest. A company that runs the web's "social operating system" could easily be worth $50B or $100B. But that seems entirely impossible now, just a few days later, thanks to OpenSocial. If there is going to be a social operating system, it's going to be the open one that wins out.

And the open nature of the platform also makes it much harder for Facebook to exploit lock-in, since it will now be much easier for consumers to move over to the next, coolest social networking site. Thus far, the history of social networks sites shows that they are way more vulnerable to the whims of fashion than, say, search engines have been -- no doubt because teenagers and twenty-somethings have been their primary audience. By creating a bigger platform, Facebook was trying to fortify itself against this threat, but OpenSocial will likely accelerate the cycles of social network fashion. Big new networks will pop up every 12 months, instead of every three years.

A Brief Outside.in Update

Some of you might have seen that we just closed another round of financing for outside.in, raising $1.5M this time from the same stellar group of investors. We've made a few great additions to the team, including some new folks on the business side of the operation who are making my life as CEO much easier. We spent most of the summer moving the site over to a new database structure (and to Ruby on Rails) which will let us do a lot of cool new things in the coming months. The new version should be live in the next week or so -- I'll post more about that when it goes up.

Radical New Innovation at Outside.in: Search!

Forgot to mention that we finally restored search to outside.in. We had a pretty lame search function in the original iteration of the site, which we decided to just kill off because it wasn't very useful (and, perhaps because it wasn't useful, no one was using it.) But we decided a few weeks ago to do a little mod of Google site search, which turns out to work very well. It still doesn't do all the fancy things that it will do down the line (like restricting your query to a fixed geographic area, or listing places by category in the results), but it's a pretty great resource already. We've got over half a million pages of content from around the web that have been geo-located in some fashion, so if you're trying to find out what people are saying about a place in your community, searching outside.in's a good place to start.

Speaking of outside.in, there have been some cool articles/posts in the last few weeks that really get what we're trying to do with the service. I think there's a natural tendency to imagine outside.in as a kind of neighborhood newspaper stitched together from various sources online, but in reality, it's a much more ambitious project than that (though it's hard enough to do the neighborhood news thing!) The real goal is to build out a geographically-aware system for tracking everything that's related to location on the web, so you can do all sorts of things with the service -- get an alert anytime there's news about a crime in your area, or target advertising to fifteen demographically similar zip codes around the country, or keep up with all the news about organic food in your city. As we've built out more of the site, it seems like people are starting to see the ultimate vision more clearly -- as in this great post from Matt McAlister, "Why Outside.In May Have The Local Solution." and this post from Jillian Burt at PopMatters, triggered by our search announcement, "The Search For Meaning Begins at Outside.in."

Then there are the questions that are best left unanswered, like this post from the TimesOnline in the UK: "Is this the new Facebook?" If you figure that it took us about a year to get a working search function, then I'd say we're on target to be the next Facebook sometime around 2018. I hope the Web still exists then!

The Department Of Blogiology Strikes Again

We couldn't help ourselves -- it was so fun calculating America's bloggiest neighborhoods, we had to go on and do the math on America's bloggiest cities, which led to my very first role in creating a USA Today infographic.

My colleague John Geraci does an excellent job explaining the results on the outside.in blog.

Outside.in: Not Just For Placebloggers Anymore

Ever since our original alpha launch last fall, the content at outside.in has been primarily made up of two sources: links to blog posts from regular placebloggers writing about their local communities, and links to other local news submitted to the site directly by users or freelancers on our payroll. But we've always known that there was an important group we were missing with this system: bloggers who write occasionally about places around them, but not exclusively. We're currently tracking over 2,000 regular placebloggers around the U.S., but the number of bloggers who have posted, from time to time, locally-relevant information is probably orders of magnitude larger.

It's true that you have always been able to submit an individual blog post as a suggested link, and so some of that part-time placeblogger content has appeared on outside.in in the past. But today we're making it far easier for those bloggers to share their location-based posts with the outside.in community. All you have to do is submit your blog URL using this form (assuming you're a registered neighbor), and then tag your posts with any of the four supported geo-tags described here: GMAP links, zipcode categories, the "Where" tag, or GeoRSS.

I've been using this system with my own blog for the past few weeks and it really works great. This post from earlier this week about Coney Island included a GMAP link to Coney Island's address in the body of the post. After an hour or two, it automatically showed up on outside.in, as a recent link for Brooklyn, for the Coney Island zip code, for the Coney Island neighborhood page, and even on the Place page for Coney Island itself. The end result is that my thoughts about Coney Island get introduced to a wider audience, and get captured in a geocoded format that will make them relevant months from now anytime someone is looking for information about that part of the world. And if you write about specific locations, you'll see your posts encoded on one of our cool new maps -- showing not only the places you've blogged about, but also the surrounding conversation (from elsewhere in the blogosphere or traditional media) about each of those places.

So if you've got a blog and got something to say about the world around you, sign up and start sharing. We can't wait to hear from you....

The Map Has To Show You Something New

I've been meaning to post about our new blogger maps at outside.in -- they were a little pet project of mine, and I'm pretty excited about how they turned out. As I've mentioned before, one of our guiding principles from the beginning has been that maps shouldn't be a prominent part of the interface, because people really don't read maps (unless they're looking for directions.) So the basic outside.in UI has the map as small as possible -- it's there to give you a basic sense of your location and zoom level and a mechanism for moving around through space -- and that's it.

But ever since we launched our place pages, which tag posts and stories with specific locations (schools, restaurants, etc), it's been clear to us that we can track the places that bloggers have been writing about in ways that most bloggers themselves can't easily do. So we thought it would be fun to create blogger maps, in a part as a service for the bloggers themselves, whose work we rely on in multiple ways.

But we didn't want to just put pins on a map for each place the blogger writes about, because for the blogger him or herself, that's not really news. When Brownstoner writes about the new Brooklyn Bridge Park pool, he doesn't need to see its location on a map -- he already knows where it is. And I'd wager most of his readers do as well.

Which gets to our other guiding map principle: the map has to show you something new.

So we decided to use the map as a discovery mechanism as well -- showing not just the territory covered by a specific blogger, but also the overlap with other bloggers who have written about the same places. So if you look at the Gowanus Lounge map, you can see recent places he's covered on the left, and then a series of orange and black "pies" on the map corresponding to each place. The size of the pie shows you how many total stories we have in our system about that place, and the ratio of orange to black shows you how much that conversation has been dominated by the current blogger. When you roll over each place, you can see headlines from all the other stories about that place.

We think this view adds a huge amount of information to the original blog itself. You can see in a single glance:

1. The general geographic focus of the current blog

2. The names of the places the blogger has written about lately

3. How active the conversation is about these particular places (ie, how many stories)

4. How crowded the conversation is (ie, how many other blogs are participating in that conversation)

5. The headlines from those other blog posts.

Now, if you knew the neighborhood well, you might be able to read through a blogger's posts and figure out #1 and #2 after a few minutes, but it'd be impossible to see #3-#5. It literally gives you a whole new view of the original content, and also manages to connect it to a wider conversation.

Cool, huh?