July 14, 2010
Ever notice a story on your Neighborhood News Page that you’d like to remove or tag but struggled to find it in Tag Stories?  Well, struggle no longer. We have added a keyword search box to the top of the Tag Stories page. Enter any word or group of words into the box, click on Find, and we’ll search the headlines and the bodies of stories (either the first 2 lines or the entire story, depending on what the particular RSS Feed publishes) for that search term. Keep in mind that if you perform a search while looking at Active Stories, you won’t get results from My Stories and Inactive Stories and vice versa. You can only search the tab you’re on. Here are a few ways to use the search feature: In Active Stories, enter the headline of a story you want to remove to find it and suppress it. Notice a story on your output that’s tagged to the wrong neighborhood? Search for its headline in Active Stories to find it and edit the neighborhood and place tags. When you add a new place to our system while place tagging a story, search for that place as a keyword in Eligible Stories. Any other stories mentioning that place will be found and you can add the new place tag to them. Want to make sure all the stories about a certain event or person have the right geotags? Search for those stories entering appropriate keywords and/or names. Those are just some of the ways in which the new search feature can be useful. So, log in to Outside.in for Publishers, click on Tag Stories, and start searching and curating.

Ever notice a story on your Neighborhood News Page that you’d like to remove or tag but struggled to find it in Tag Stories?  Well, struggle no longer. We have added a keyword search box to the top of the Tag Stories page. Enter any word or group of words into the box, click on Find, and we’ll search the headlines and the bodies of stories (either the first 2 lines or the entire story, depending on what the particular RSS Feed publishes) for that search term. Keep in mind that if you perform a search while looking at Active Stories, you won’t get results from My Stories and Inactive Stories and vice versa. You can only search the tab you’re on.

Here are a few ways to use the search feature:

  • In Active Stories, enter the headline of a story you want to remove to find it and suppress it.
  • Notice a story on your output that’s tagged to the wrong neighborhood? Search for its headline in Active Stories to find it and edit the neighborhood and place tags.
  • When you add a new place to our system while place tagging a story, search for that place as a keyword in Eligible Stories. Any other stories mentioning that place will be found and you can add the new place tag to them.
  • Want to make sure all the stories about a certain event or person have the right geotags? Search for those stories entering appropriate keywords and/or names.

Those are just some of the ways in which the new search feature can be useful. So, log in to Outside.in for Publishers, click on Tag Stories, and start searching and curating.

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December 11, 2009

Mark Josephson Hits The Nail On The Head

In a recent Q&A with econsultancy (http://bit.ly/4TmdL6) Mark Josephson said:

Outside.in’s Neighborhood News Pages can help local newspapers (and TV and radio stations) by solving a few key problems for them: extending their editorial coverage to a more granular, neighborhood level with no additional headcount; automating the content syndication and network relationships with local bloggers; the geographic organization of their own content and the creation of more high-quality hyperlocal ad inventory.  This is where the local media companies have a huge head start.

We hope you agree…

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December 9, 2009

The Series B Round: What It Means for Publishers

You may have seen the announcement of our Series B round of financing.  It’s a mark of a very exciting and busy time for us.  The ongoing support of our existing investors and the addition of a few more continue the validation that all of you have been giving us since you first started registering for Outside.in for Publishers.  The news about our partnership with CNN hit today, but that’s not the only big partner we’ve added recently.  The list of news outlets sporting Neighborhood News Pages now includes The Chicago Tribune, The New York Post, StLToday.com, The Baltimore Sun, NBC4i in Columbus and SeaCoastOnline among many others.  We’re building an ecosystem on which all parts are interdependent, and with the addition of a few more big partners, all signs point to growth throughout the system. Here are some highlights:

  • More and Better Products: At the risk of stating the obvious, the injection of cash will enable us to expand our resources.  We can now accelerate our progress on OIP feature requests that have been rolling in since our launch in June. From an API to new widgets to topic tags, our queue is long and exciting.  Furthermore, we can build out the other pillars of the business, such as Outside.in for Bloggers.
  • More Traffic: The hyperlocal content served on all the partner sites comes from our aggregated headlines and links, sorted by location as always.  In the OIP registration process, you submitted your feeds to our system; therefore, your stories are included in our aggregated content.  The bigger our partner network, the more opportunities there are for traffic to come your way.  This is especially true when we add a national partner.
  • More Content: The prospect of having headlines appear on major media sites is a big incentive for bloggers to join our network.  The feeds they submit are available to you in your Outside.in for Publishers account.  You’ll have access to more stories to more thoroughly cover the neighborhoods and towns in your market.  The explosion of local hyperlocal content will continue to your benefit!

And that’s just the beginning.  The sun is shining at the Outside.in World HQ and not just because we got new windows with no blinds.

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November 4, 2009

Maintenance Complete and Successful

We have completed tonight’s scheduled maintenance to great effect.

All OIP pages and widgets are now fully stable.  The most noticeable improvements are on the Tag Stories pages.  In the past, especially if you were blacklisting many feeds, your Tag Stories pages would load very slowly or not at all.  Now, it’s an entirely different story.  Those pages are now quite snappy.

We hope you enjoy the upgrade and we thank you for your patience.

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November 2, 2009

Database Upgrade 11/3/09 10pm EST—Widgets Stable Throughout!

A quick heads up that we’ve scheduled a database upgrade for tomorrow (11/3/09) at 10pm EST.  We’re making our DB *more powerful,* which should have positive effects all around.

*****IMPORTANT*****

Maps, Headline lists and Neighborhood News Pages WILL NOT BE DOWN during this maintenance.  Because of our clever caching, they will remain stable throughout.

Your dashboard at publishers.outside.in WILL BE DOWN.  It should be back up at around 11pm EST.  If you’re an obsessive feed manager, story tagger, or layout configurer, I’m sorry; you’ll have to take an hour break.

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October 1, 2009

Where’d you put your hyperlocal? #2: The Custom Wrap

The Custom Wrap works best when you already have a few pages dedicated to hyperlocal and you want to supplement that coverage with outside.in’s aggregated content.  Whereas The Standard is the fastest way to get hyperlocal when you’re starting from scratch, The Custom Wrap is an excellent way to deepen your coverage in an existing neighborhood or scale a hyperlocal project to more neighborhoods and towns than your resources have afforded thus far.

The Layout Configuration: You already have custom URLs, wraps, and a brand for your local pages.  Now, create a separate Neighborhood News Page layout in a separate stylesheet for each town or neighborhood you would like to cover. Drop the code into the center well on the corresponding page for that community.  If you have community-specific content you’d like to feature, put the headlines above the map and anything else in the sidebars around the maps.  Now, drop links to these pages in strategic, traffic-driving positions around your site. You could even build dropdown menus that drive your readers to these pages like the NYPost did.

Advanced config: If you have available development resources, there’s a way to do this by just making one Neighborhood News Page.  There’s also a way to make the dropdown menus of the Headline Lists and Map Widgets redirect to your custom pages.  Contact jared@outside.in for instructions.

The Feed Management: (The same as The Standard) The goal is to maximize your journalistic coverage and organize it by location, so accept all or most of the mainstream media feeds and the more professional blogs that offer responsible reporting.

The Benefit: This is a much deeper integration of Outside.in content that makes the entire page specific to the community, not just the piece that outside.in serves.  You get the SEO benefit of URLs that include the neighborhood name, such as http://www.nypost.com/news/local/manhattan/chelsea.  Furthermore, while it is possible to automatically specify your ad tags to the neighborhood called by our javascript in The Standard implementation, you might find it easier to geotarget your ads with The Custom Wrap.  The trick to this integration is that once you build the pages, you have to be clever about promoting them.  We suggest building a simple, yet eye-catching box of links to neighborhoods that are important to your readers.  You can see good examples in the slideshows at the top of scnow.com and counton2.com.

Examples:

The New York Post

SeaCoast Online

Fox4KC

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September 25, 2009

Where’d you put your hyperlocal? #1: The Standard

Wondering how to use Outside.in for Publishers with your site? This is the first of several posts in which I’ll detail the implementation practices that have become most popular in OIP’s first two months on the market.  Follow the directions in the post or let it trigger your creativity to do something new and exciting.

Let’s start with…

The Standard

The Layout Configuration: Make a new page using one of your existing templates (article page or section front are the most common) and replace the guts with the JS for a Neighborhood News Page that has your metro area as the default.  Give it a simple and clear URL, such as xxx.com/neighborhoods and link to it from your site nav.  Then, put Map Only or Headline List Widgets on your homepage and article pages.

The Feed Management: The goal is to maximize your journalistic coverage and organize it by location, so you accept all or most of the mainstream media feeds and the more professional blogs that offer responsible reporting.

The Benefit: The most simple and fast route to upwards of hundreds of new pages on your site—one for every town and neighborhood in your market—The Standard is an excellent choice for publishers who want to increase their local reach but don’t have an excess of resources.  By accepting a high number of stories from trustworthy feeds, you can quickly cover areas you never have.  By putting maps and headline lists on your high traffic pages, you increase the visibility of your new coverage and help your readers grow accustomed to navigating news by location.

Examples:

Chicago Breaking News

WREG.com

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September 18, 2009
The view from my desk. The pins represent markets in which we have active OIP Users.  Clearly, the west coast needs to step it up a notch.  To see a rolling announcement of new partners be sure to visit our company blog where Camilla Cho announces a new one almost every day.

The view from my desk. The pins represent markets in which we have active OIP Users.  Clearly, the west coast needs to step it up a notch.  To see a rolling announcement of new partners be sure to visit our company blog where Camilla Cho announces a new one almost every day.

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September 11, 2009

Use OIP To Make Your Own Twitter Widget

On the main blog we announced a new page (Twitter Widget of the Hour) that will display the latest Twitter widget we make using OIP, as well as an archive of all the previous widgets. Today’s feature is tweets from players in the MLB pennant race.  Go here to take a gander and put it on your site or just grab the code right away.

It’s a lot of fun for us to come up with new widgets for you, but the real power of OIP is that it’s a platform.  So, you can make your own Twitter widget on any subject such as Local Politicians, Local Bands, Local Sports Stars…anything really.  Here’s how:

  1. Create a new Outside.in for Publishers account (even if you already have one).  Choose your own market if your topic is locally focused.  If your topic isn’t tied to a specific area (such as Pennant Race Tweets), choose a rural market, somewhere in which you don’t expect to find any other feeds.
  2. In your new OIP account, go to Manage Feeds and deactivate all of the existing feeds.
  3. Add Twitter feeds. Go to the Find People page on Twitter. (You’ll have to log in to Twitter.) Search for the person whose account you want to aggregate. If you find them, click on “RSS feed of [user]’s tweets.” Copy that URL (the feed URL) and add it to your OIP account by clicking on Add A New Feed in Manage Feeds.  It’s helpful to check the box that says My Site Publishes This Feed.  (It’s a good idea to read a few tweets before you add the feed.  You want to make sure the account is authentic and not an imposter.)  Rinse and repeat until done.
  4. Go to Configure Layouts in your OIP account and create a Headline List. Be sure to uncheck “Show ‘Explore a neighborhood’ header and region dropdowns” and “Show article summaries.”  Set the font and color styles to fit your site. Then comes The Most Important Step: copy the code for the Headline List and put it on your site!
  5. From time to time, go to Tag Stories>Stories from My Feeds in OIP and add the major metro area of your market as a Neighborhood Tag to tweets you want to display.

And that’s all.  5 simple steps on our platform to displaying tweets on your site in a tidy Headline List.  We can’t wait to see what you come up with.  Leave questions in the comments.

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August 31, 2009

US Open/Twitter Widget

Check out the really cool US Open Twitter mash-up widget we made with Outside.in for Publishers.  To see it in action go here: http://bit.ly/1FjmEM.

If you want to cut straight to putting it on your site, pick up the code here: http://pastie.org/600829.

If you want to customize the widget follow these 4 simple steps:

1. Create an account on Outside.in for Publishers (publishers.outside.in), selecting New York Metro Area as your market.

2. Look under manage feeds and blacklist all those that aren’t twitter accounts for tennis players.

3. Go to configure layouts and build a headline list with your styles. (Make sure to NOT show the ‘Explore a Neighborhood Header’ nor the ‘Article Summaries.’)

4. Copy the code and paste it on your US Open page or Sports page.

It only takes a few minutes to make and The US Open only lasts two weeks, so put the widget up today!

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