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Local news buzzmap by Outside.in

13.Jun.2007

The local news portal Outside.in integrated a new visualization system on their bloggers page. Now for each blogger, you can see a map with the latest news locations they posted pinpointed. For each related place, there’s a small graph showing the percentage of stories from the blogger against the other bloggers. As the creators say, it gives you the possibility to see how much buzz there is around a specific area and how many people are covering it. It also helps creating a real local community of bloggers, since you can check you is also covering your neighborhood. Here’s an example from an active blog source.

There’s also another buzzmap, this time locked in the a particular Brooklyn area. It comes with an animation that spreads through several months, showing not only the location of the related stories and their frequency but particularly the percentage of coverage by bloggers against mainstream media. There you can see how hard it is for mainstream media to compete in local territories with the coverage of online residents.

With the increase usage of geo tags this kind of services can become more useful and popular. There are lots of stories out there, sometimes forgotten in an archive, ready to be digged for the use of local and global communities.

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