Blog aggregator outside.in, which is trying to index all locally-focused blogs in the nation, just e-mailed me to inform me that they’ve removed cvillenews.com because “it does not have enough hyperlocal content to be included in our site.” This is the same site that declined the OPML for Charlottesville Blogs last fall, saying that they’d rather all 230 bloggers created an account on outside.in and manually submitted their site. It might be time they rethought the ol’ business plan.
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Waldo, that’s the problem with being an aggragator when others also want to aggragate.
There are two forms of “aboutness” here and they are probably missing the more lucrative angle. One form says that cvilleblogs.com is a group of people writing about life in Charlottesville, which is true some of the time, but as the editors of inside.in note, it isn’t the rule. The other form says that people in Charlottesville write about a set of given topics.
Which definition of “about” is more useful to marketers and demographers? Which is more likely to be mined for regional trends? Any fool could aggregate blog postings about a locality, but it would take more effort to say something about the people, tastes and interests of a locality.
They may be thinking about this in a shallow way, but it is no skin off my nose. I just find it curious.
I can understand them not accepting cvilleblogs, since that’s just an aggregate of bloggers from Charlottesville, not limited to those writing about Charlottesville. But I don’t understand the logic behind dropping cvillenews.com… “does not have enough hyperlocal content to be included in our site” — I can’t think of another cville-based site that does a better job of producing “hyperlocal content.” Was it a problem with the regularity of updates or the actual content not being deemed worthy?
Eh, whatever — I’ve never heard of outside.in until now anyway.
When they rejected Charlottesville Blogs, they only did so because they didn’t have everybody’s ZIP code. I explained there are only a half dozen here, and they could probably just put everybody in 22902 and it wouldn’t make any difference. The fact that many people are not often writing about local matters is, though, a perfectly good reason not to list the site.
Not listing cvillenews.com, though, is just bizarre.
cvillenews.com doesn’t have enough hyper-local content?? What do they want, a blog in which every post starts: “It’s a beautiful day in Charlottesville…”?
Their pickiness is troubling. If you try to find news and blogs in Charlottesville, VA, they come back with a message about how they “haven’t come to this area yet”. You’d think they’d settle for generally local content, then prune away the less relevant stuff as new data sources appeared. Instead, they have nothing.
I just wanted to clear up a few misunderstandings. cvillenews.com *is* currently in the outside.in system and it is exactly the type of content we are looking for!
I wrote to you on Monday to let you know that waldo.jaquith.org (not cvillenews) had been deleted from our system a while back because it did not deal with hyperlocal issues.
Because of a bug in our system, outside.in/charlottesville was not displaying correctly. I realized the error when I read the comments on your post (This is the sort of feedback that would be great to hear. Locals know best!). It works just fine now, and to view cvillenews.com and other local city-wide blogs, just zoom out (using the – on the map) or go to outside.in/charlottesville+5.
I always love to hear constructive feedback. Please contact me directly with any concerns or questions.
Thanks!
Chrysanthe
Neighbor Liaison
chrysanthe@outside.in
Good to hear, Chrysanthe — glad this was just a bug. :-)