Steven Johnson announces the birth of outside.in, “an attempt to collectively build the geographic Web, neighborhood by neighborhood.” It’s in the early stages (may I please have a link to “home”?), but I’m thinking it could be very cool.
Once you spend a decent amount of time online, especially if you’re a blog reader, you realize that there is so much content out there. The shameful thing is that so much of it is just sort of floating in the either. The potential is there for a service like outside.in to add some tethers or anchors to all this information, aggregating all the events, stories, and conversations happening in a community. It’s RSS for where you live.
While the description has something of a present-tense bias, there is the potential for rich juxtaposition of old and new by integrating something like geo-tagged Wikipedia entries. Maybe if you hear a little buzz about the Atlanta Beltline project, you could hop over and learn about it one of the neighborhoods it will cross, like Cabbagetown. What you end up with is a conversation that is not only (gleefully) tied to a physical location, but there is also the history running parallel (or is that perpendicular?).
I wonder if there are any plans for mobile-friendly access? Seems like a cool way for travelers to get acquainted as well. The obvious challenge is getting enough caring people and relevant data in there. I like it, let’s see where it goes.
Mark Larson 