Steven Johnson's Outside.in: Local 2.0

Before Joshua Schachter's del.icio.us, before Kevin Rose's Digg, before Jason Calacanis' Netscape, there was Plastic. Web visionaries Steven Johnson, Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman came together in 2001 and brought with them FEED, Suck, and Alt.Culture to establish a 'live collaboration between the Web's smartest readers and the Web's smartest editors, a place to suggest and discuss the most worthwhile news, opinions, rumors, humor, and anecdotes online.'

What resulted from the first part of that mission was the creation of a new center for new media cool. The mission's second part is what proved to be pivotal, groundbreaking, and archetypal in the history of the social web. Instead of just presenting stories submitted by users, posts on Plastic were chosen by the best editors found on the web-the whole web (including affiliate sites like Movieline, Nerve, NetSlaves, Spin, TeeVee, and The New Republic) intelligently aggregated into manageable chunks by editors under the direction of Joey Anuff, Plastic's editor-in-chief.

Editors and affiliate sites were to get part of Plastic's ad revenue, traffic, attention and profile. The money never came though, and while Plastic got a lot of buzz, a year after launch, the affiliates left along with Suck,Feed, Joey Anuff and Steven Johnson.

What they left behind was an influential model that aggregated quality content, enabled users to rate it, talk about it, and, secondarily rate the contributions of the participants in the conversation the aggregated content spawned. Plastic was one of the first and certainly the highest profile execution of a social media model that successfully integrated principles still in vogue today: quality content, participation, conversation, attention, and gestures.

The essence of that model (participants with high user ranking were recognized and given access to make higher order editorial contributions themselves) is at the center of leading social sites like Digg and Netscape. But, more interestingly, the evolution of that model is at the core of a recently launched site founded by bestselling author Steven Johnson-the same Steven Johnson who co-founded Plastic.

This time his idea is more focused...and universal. Johnson's first major web site since Plastic and FEED, is "an attempt to collectively build the geographic Web, neighborhood by neighborhood."

Recently, one of the most interesting and dynamic parts of the Web is the part dedicated to local. The increase in number and influence of hyperlocal blogs-maintained by individuals or teams to share observations, impressions, and experiences of a particular place-review sites like Yelp and Judy's Book, and mainstream local media, particularly newspapers as they attempt online to hold on to audiences increasingly uninterested in print have all contributed to a "divided space".

There have been attempts to make some sense of the space using aggregation, efforts like Topix.net. However, those methods are "dumb" and yield results almost exclusively drawn from local mainstream media that read like a schizophrenic crime blotter-results that don't contain as much hyperlocal content as they do content only grossly relevant to the neighborhood the user's interested in.

But outside.in is more than just a "smart" aggregator. It's built around many of the driving principles and tools of the social web: blogs, geographic and category tags, providing users with tools to generate results that are as specific and relevant as possible, and the recognition that content, specifically hyperlocal content, has a long tail. The last conceit and core principle of outside.in is the most compelling part of the application. Johnson explains:

Local news often has a long-shelf life. One thing both blogs and traditional newspapers share is that they are organized around time, with the latest news given priority. But a lot of neighborhood information is news that stays news: a parent's comment about the science program at a local school is just as relevant six months after it was posted; a guide to gay-friendly bars could be useful for years. That's why outside.in is designed not just as a "latest headlines" service; it's also an evolving neighborhood encyclopedia, capturing all the things that have been said about specific places.

Outside.in aggregates hyperlocal content (posts written by hyperlocal bloggers and tagged by geography) in much the same way Plastic aggregated content from all over. And just as Plastic relied upon high quality contributions from editors and affiliates, outside.in is driven by select content written by authors with specific knowledge of what's going on in their own back yard and a demonstrated ability to report it in a compelling way whether they're amateur or professional.

The result is a relevant and engaging experience driven by place.

Johnson and the rest of his team who also live in Brooklyn (possibly the Hyperlocal blog capital of the world) have seeded outside.in with approximately 500 blogs from the top 25 metropolitan markets in the country-but the Brooklyn offerings are, right now, some of the richest.

So check it out. As Johnson writes, "sit at a computer and type in a street address, or a neighborhood name, or a zip code -- perhaps for your own home area, perhaps for a place you're visiting or interested in -- and within seconds the screen gives you a glimpse of all the textured, real-world issues and conversations and news unfolding in the location you've entered."

Photo by Esther Dyson