Part-Time Placeblogging

I like to invest in the services we use and I like the use the services we invest in. I find it's better to start out as a user and become an investor.

So when I started using outside.in, I wanted to get the posts I was doing about places into the service. And I wanted the Gotham Gal to be able to do the same. I submitted our blogs feeds to outside.in and tagged them with a zip code. And then realized that everything we were posting was going to get geotagged and posted to outside.in

So right then and there, well before we invested in the company, I saw a big problem with the service, but also a big opportunity. I urged the company to figure out a way to allow "part time placebloggers" to use outside.in

Most bloggers are not full time placebloggers like curbed or brownstoner. Most of us blog mostly about music, or technology, or politics, or knitting, or whatever. But we all live in places. We all visit places. And we all post at times about places. And the idea behind outside.in is to make all of this blogging about places discoverable, to facilitate the conversation about places the way techmeme gets conversations going in the tech world.

So it's critical that part-time placebloggers get picked up in outside.in or any local oriented service that intends to cover a place or a set of places.

The Gotham Gal and I have been using a service from outside.in that solves this "part time placeblogger" problem for the past month or two and it has worked like a charm. Today the company has announced it's availability to anyone who posts occasionally about places.

Here's how it works.

1 - become a neighbor (ie register) at outside.in

2 - tell outside.in that you are a "part time placeblogger" and give them your blog's URL

3 - put a google map link in any place post you write, or tag it with a zipcode in the post's tag field, or just type where:10010 (or whatever is the correct zipcode) right into the blog post.

That's it. Steven Johnson has a good description of how this works and why its a big step on his blog (and also at the outside.in blog).

If you occasionally blog about places, give it a try. It takes a little time for the post to show up in outside.in but it will be there in at least an hour or two and given all the distribution deals outside.in is working on, it will probably show up in a lot of other places on the web that are about the place you blog about.

Comments

[JJ]

Of all your investments this is by far the worst. i do not see the need. They sure do spam a lot.

[NICCAI]

Any chance this will go outside the USA?

[yourlocaltutor]

I am curious as to how this service could generate revenue ...

[Tim Post]

Does outside.in allow placeblogging from cities outside the US? I am blogging about Krasnodar, Russia and would love to use the service but was able to figure-out how to set-up a zip code outside the US.

[Tim Post]

Does outside.in allow placeblogging from cities outside the US? I am blogging about Krasnodar, Russia and would love to use the service but was able to figure-out how to set-up a zip code outside the US.

[Steven Johnson]

Niccai and Tim, we are US-based for the moment, but are actively working on expanding, probably first to English-speaking countries like the UK, Canada, etc -- then the WORLD! :)

As for revenue, we think being able to target advertising down to the level of the zip code (both for national advertisers looking for specific demographics around the country, and for local advertisers) is going to be a VERY lucrative business in the next few years.

JJ -- what spam are you talking about? I think you have us confused with someone else. We send out email updates about new features, etc once every two weeks or so, only to registered users.

[Ori Lahav]

Hi Fred
Got this via outbrain recommendation service and found it very interesting.
Since you are involved in this company i think you all might find the service sailblogs.com are giving to their bloggers very interesting.
Of course there are no "zipcodes" at sea but the let them enter geographic position of where a post was written.

at least for mariners this data can be very useful for searches of blog posts based on geo position.
I think such feature or cooperation between outside.in and sailblog can be very helpful.

Ori