Outside.in, as I've written about before, is a local news aggregation site where content from local news sites and blogs are organized by city, neighborhood, and / or zip code to build a create a unique collection of news from a wide variety of sources.

Local bloggers submit their sites to outside.in. The site then indexes the local blogger's sites on a regular basis and displays headlines with snippets on outside.in, driving traffic back to the primary source for the full story.

One of the challenges with this model is a lot of local writes don't consistently write about local content. It's, in fact, very common for people to write about a new restaurant they checked out, a concert, or something related to local politics, with a mix of Dilbert cartoons and other non-geographically significant content.

I found this out first hand when I submitted my personal blog to Outside.in. It was accepted at first, but they eventually grew tired of my random observations. This poses a challenge because when I do write about local events, I'm creating exactly the type of content outside.in is looking for, but the rest of the time, it's junk from their stand point.

There are three solutions to this challenge:

1. Submit individual stories to Outside.in. Once you've posted a geographically significant story, go to outside.in, click on the Submit Story link on the right column, and paste in the URL of your story. You'll then be asked to provide a location for the story, such as the city/state, zip, or address relevant to the story along with some tags to help sort it. That's it. By the way, the stories don't have to be about where you live, but about some location, so stories about vacations could be tagged with appropriate locations as well. The biggest problem with this approach is remembering to do it.

 
2. Use FeedBurner's Outside.in FeedFlare. After burning your blog's RSS feed with FeedBurner, tack on the Outside.in FeedFlare. This will add a "Geocode this Post" link to the footer of each post in your feed (or on your blog). Once a post goes live, you or your readers can click that link to geotag appropriate posts. Clicking the link passes the post's URL to outside.in, basically taking you directly to step 2 of the geotagging process. This cuts a little time out of solution #1, and gives you a reminder to geotag posts.


3. Categorize posts and submit categories to outside.in. Rather than manually geotagging each post, how about automatically submitting appropriate posts to Outside.in based on the categories you assign to them? This guarantees that appropriate posts from your blog will be indexed by outside.in in a timely manner as long as you include them in appropriate categories. To do this, create a category of your blog for your city, neighborhood, or zip code. Next, create a feed for that category.

Wordpress example:


Take the feed URL, and submit that to Outside.in as a web site. Outside.in will choke on it a bit, but it will take it. Once submitted, whenever you categorize a post with that category (in this case, Minneapolis) it will automatically syndicate onto Outside.in.

You can do this for more than one location by submitting more than one category of your site as "sites" to Outside.in.

NOTE: The FD FeedBurner Plugin for Wordpress may redirect category feeds to the blog's primary feed, forcing you to choose how you'd like to handle this. I worked around this by turning off the FD plug-in and updated the RSS feed URLs in header.php to solve this.

Movable Type: I haven't tested this on Movable Type, but here is a link to instructions on how to create category-based feeds. Once created, follow the steps listed above.