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The entries for the Boston neighborhood known as Union Square provide some insight into the challenges faced by both YourStreet and Outside.in. YourStreet's algorithms did filter out all the stories about the famous Union Squares in New York and San Francisco. But there was a story about the Union Square in Somerville, a city located very close to Boston. Outside.in, on the other hand, included only posts that were relevant to Union Square in Boston, but it didn't provide as broad a range of fresh material as YourStreet did.
Dan Gillmor, director of the Center for Citizen Media, says that companies are still figuring out how to provide hyper-local news properly. "YourStreet's approach of combining aggregation with content creation seems promising," he says. However, he notes that YourStreet faces heavy competition from other geographically focused sites, which run the gamut from Google Earth, to the do-it-yourself atlas site Platial, to the local-news service Topix.
Nicholson says that YourStreet will add a few features in the near future. In about a month, the site will launch an algorithm that compiles statistics on which stories are more interesting to users and brings those stories to the top. The site will also launch a widget that bloggers can use to paste information from YourStreet onto their sites. More far-off plans include the launch of a tool kit that developers can use to integrate with YourStreet, and a system that would allow users to classify stories by subject matter. The company plans to make money through targeted advertising.
Microsoft's latest operating system makes it easier to integrate location detection with other services.
Guest (TedColtman)
Algorithms for geographic filtering & tagging
I'm pleased to read that YourStreet is working on improving the algorithms to recognize place-nicknames, but that is only one of the obstacles that geographic parsing must overcome in dealing with typical current news streams. Another is disambiguation of place-names when a lot of geographic information is implicit in the audience's minds, rather than explicit in the text of the news story. My first quick visit to YourStreet highlighted this for me as I checked out stories related to the neighborhood in which I live -- Washington DC's Capitol Hill. Most of the stories there were about Congressional proceedings. To be fair, the US Congress does transact most of its business a few blocks from my house, but the metaphorical "Capitol Hill" to which many journalists refer in their texts bears only a tenuous relationship to the "literal" "Capitol Hill" that surrounds the US Capitol on three sides. A similar problem arises when a story refers simply to a district (e.g., "Downtown", in many places) with boundaries so imprecise that many knowledgeable local people would disagree on whether any particular site was within the district or not. Resolving these kinds of problems will be very important for hyper-local journalism, so it will be exciting to watch as people compete to do so.
Guest (horatio92)
Re: Algorithms for geographic filtering & tagging
The first thing that I checked was wrong. It was from a place in Baltimore 20 miles away with a similar name. I clicked on the "wrong address" feedback link.
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1 Comment
visualizing the news
Great discussion. The cartographic/mapping aspects of hyperlocalism are only beginning to be really explored. I think a lot of folks are still trying to wrap their head around hyperlocal journalism (which tends to be pitched in tandem with citizen journalism) and there is loads of room for discussion on how it can be represented and distributed online. I've been reseaching this topic as well, thanks for some new links to dig into. :)
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