Category: potrero hill

Why Outside.in may have the local solution

The recent blog frenzy over hyperlocal media inspired me to have a look at Outside.in again.


It’s not just the high profile backers and the intense competitive set that make Outside.in worth a second look. There’s something very compelling in the way they are connecting data that seems like it matters.

My initial thought when it launched was that this idea had been done before too many times already. Topix.net appeared to be a dominant player in the local news space, not to mention similar but different kinds of local efforts at startups like Yelp and amongst all the big dotcoms.

And even from their strong position, Topix’s location-based news media aggregaton model was kind of, I don’t know, uninteresting. I’m not impressed with local media coverage these days, in general, so why would an aggregator of mediocre coverage be any more interesting than what I discover through my RSS reader?

But I think Outside.in starts to give some insight into how local media could be done right…how it could be more interesting and, more importantly, useful.

The light triggered for me when I read Jon Udell’s post on “the data finds the data”. He explains how data can be a vector through which otherwise unrelated people meet eachother, a theme that continues to resonate for me.

Media brands have traditionally been good at connecting the masses to eachother and to marketers. But the expectation of how directly people feel connected to other individuals by the media they share has changed.

Whereas the brand once provided a vector for connections, data has become the vehicle for people to meet people now. Zip code, for example, enables people to find people. So does marital status, date and time, school, music taste, work history. There are tons of data points that enable direct human-to-human discovery and interaction in ways that media brands could only accomplish in abstract ways in the past.

URLs can enable connections, too. Jon goes on to explain:

“On June 17 I bookmarked this item from Mike Caulfield… On June 19 I noticed that Jim Groom had responded to Mike’s post. Ten days later I noticed that Mike had become Jim’s new favorite blogger.

I don’t know whether Jim subscribes to my bookmark feed or not, but if he does, that would be the likely vector for this nice bit of manufactured serendipity. I’d been wanting to introduce Mike at KSC to Jim (and his innovative team) at UMW. It would be delightful to have accomplished that introduction by simply publishing a bookmark.”

Now, Outside.in allows me to post URLs much like one would do in Newsvine or Digg any number of other collaborative citizen media services. But Outside.in leverages the zip code data point as the topical vector rather than a set of predetermined one-size-fits-all categories. It then allows miscellaneous tagging to be the subservient navigational pivot.

Suddenly, I feel like I can have a real impact on the site if I submit something. If there’s anything near a critical mass of people in the 94107 zip code on Outside.in then it’s likely my neighbors will be influenced by my posts.

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures explains:

“They’ve built a platform that placebloggers can submit their content to. Their platform “tags” that content with a geocode — an address, zip code, or city — and that renders a new page for every location that has tagged content. If you visit outside.in/10010, you’ll find out what’s going on in the neigborhood around Union Square Ventures. If you visit outside.in/back_bay, you’ll see what’s going on in Boston’s Back Bay neighborhood.”

Again, the local online media model isn’t new. In fact, it’s old. CitySearch in the US and UpMyStreet in the UK proved years ago that a market does in fact exist in local media somehwere somehow, but the market always feels fragile and susceptible to ghost town syndrome.

Umair Haque explains why local is so hard:

“Why doesn’t Craigslist choose small towns? Because there isn’t enough liquidity in the market. Let me put that another way. In cities, there are enough buyers and sellers to make markets work – whether of used stuff, new stuff, events, etc, etc.

In smaller towns, there just isn’t enough supply or demand.”

If they commit to building essentially micro media brands based exclusively on location I suspect Outside.in will run itself into the ground spending money to establish critical mass in every neighborhood around the world.

Now that they have a nice micro media approach that seems to work they may need to start thinking about macro media. In order to reach the deep dark corners of the physical grid, they should connect people in larger contexts, too. Here’s an example of what I mean…

I’m remodeling the Potrero Hill shack we call a house right now. It’s all I talk about outside of work, actually. And I need to understand things like how to design a kitchen, ways to work through building permits, and who can supply materials and services locally for this job.

There must be kitchen design experts around the world I can learn from. Equally, I’m sure there is a guy around the corner from me who can give me some tips on local services. Will Architectural Digest or Home & Garden connect me to these different people? No. Will The San Francisco Chronicle connect us? No.

Craigslist won’t even connect us, because that site is so much about the transaction.

I need help both from people who can connect on my interest vector in addition to the more local geographic vector. Without fluid connections on both vectors, I’m no better off than I was with my handy RSS reader and my favorite search engine.

Looking at how they’ve decided to structure their data, it seems Outside.in could pull this off and connect my global affinities with my local activities pretty easily.

This post is way too long already (sorry), but it’s worth pointing out some of the other interesting things they’re doing if you care to read on.

Outside.in is also building automatic semantic links with the contributors’ own blogs. By including my zip code in a blog post, Outside.in automatically drinks up that post and adds it into the pool. They even re-tag my post with the correct geodata and offer GeoRSS feeds back out to the world.

Here are the instructions:

“Any piece of content that is tagged with a zip code will be assigned to the corresponding area within outside.in’s system. You can include the zip code as either a tag or a category, depending on your blogging platform.”

I love this.

30Boxes does something similar where I can tell it to collect my Upcoming data, and it automatically imports events as I tag them in Upcoming.

They are also recognizing local contributors and shining light on them with prominant links. I can see who the key bloggers are in my area and perhaps even get a sense of which ones matter, not just who posts the most. I’m guessing they will apply the “people who like this contributor also like this contributor” type of logic to personalize the experience for visitors at some point.

Now what gets me really excited is to think about the ad model that could happen in this environment of machine-driven semantic relationships.

If they can identify relevant blog posts from local contributors, then I’m sure they could identify local coupons from good sources of coupon feeds.

Let’s say I’m the national Ace Hardware marketing guy, and I publish a feed of coupons. I might be able to empower all my local Ace franchises and affiliates to publish their own coupons for their own areas and get highly relevant distribution on Outside.in. Or I could also run a national coupon feed with zip code tags cooked into each item.

To Umair’s point, that kind of marketing will only pay off in major metros where the markets are stronger.

To help address the inventory problem, Outside.in could then offer to sell ad inventory on their contributors’ web sites. As an Outside.in contributor, I would happily run Center Hardware coupons, my local Ace affiliate, on my blog posts that talk about my remodelling project if someone gave them to me in some automated way.

If they do something like this then they will be able to serve both the major metros and the smaller hot spots that you can never predict will grow. Plus, the incentives for the individuals in the smaller communities start feeding the wider ecosystem that lives on the Outside.in platform.

Outside.in would be pushing leverage out to the edge both in terms of participation as they already do and in terms of revenue generation, a fantastic combination of forces that few media companies have figured out, yet.

I realize there are lots of ‘what ifs’ in this assessment. The company has a lot of work to do before they breakthrough, and none of it is easy. The good news for them is that they have something pretty solid that works today despite a crowded market.

Regardless, knowing Fred Wilson, Esther Dyson, John Seely Brown and Steven Berlin Johnson are behind it, among others, no doubt they are going to be one to watch.

Crime data stories

My Potrero Hill neighbors tell me that the sweet song of crackling firearms in the evening always begins again in May as the days get longer, hotter and schoolless.

Recently, I witnessed a sample of the gun play happening in the nearby projects, and I decided to do some of my own research to understand what’s going on. The first thing I found was that I wasn’t the only witness to this particular incident:

“Two of the bullets hit our daughters bedroom– one went through the wall and crossed a small portion of the room and lodged in another wall near her sliding glass door.

[The Police] told us that based on the 24 bullet shells they found up the hill on Missouri St. near the public housing, there were two guns involved, one of which was an AK47 the other was probably a 9mm pistol. The police have no idea who was firing the guns and given that there are not witnesses, there is not likely to be any resolution to the incident. The officers were confident that the two bullets that hit the condo were random and not targeted at us.”

There are lots of factors behind violent neghborhoods, and the San Francisco projects are pretty densely representative of many of those factors. But it really irritates me that guns are so prevalent in the area, and, in general, so prevalent in America.

So, I started my journey at the old PotreroHillSF Crime Mashup which apparently doesn’t work any more. There is an ongoing “Police Blotter” on the site, though, with some good reporting.


I then found the official San Francisco Police Department Crime Map. Of course, the data is wrapped in their own heavy-handed user interface and unavailable in common shareable web data formats. The tool is burdened with legal trappings and strangely fails to acknowledge homicides, though they offer an explanation:

“A homicide may not appear correctly on the map because:

  1. The incident was initially reported as an assault and the victim died some time later from the injuries.
  2. The incident was reported as an arson, and the body was not found until a later time.
  3. A body was found and the cause of death was not obvious to the officer making the incident report.”

I’m hoping that the City has more advanced reporting capabilities internally, as it seems pretty obvious that we have a data visualization failure going on here. I can see some data around assaults, robberies, larceny, vandalism, drug incidents, etc.

But the compelling visual storytelling is missing.

I want to know how many crime incidents in the projects this year involved guns. How many guns in these events are registered/unregistered? How many of the gun incidents were or became homicides vs non-gun related incidents? Where did the guns come from? What kinds are being used?

I suspect most guns aren’t registered which is an argument used by those who think a gun ban would be useless. People who want guns will find them, legal or not. But I also suspect that the victims aren’t carrying guns. Thus, the argument that people should have the right to own a gun to protect themselves isn’t a counterbalancing force. People who avoid violence won’t carry guns, legal or not.

As I progressed with this research I realized that somewhere in between raw data and overt campaigning is an interesting space. Data can help us learn and make more intelligent and informed decisions about how to manage and evolve our society and its rules.

Unfortunately, that space seems more difficult to find than it should be. I should be able to download data for myself or at least be able to visualize the stories behind the data in relevant pictures and charts.

Of course, there’s the fantastic ChicagoCrime.org web site which has done a lot to raise awareness about crime data. Despite the lack of available data from the local government, site owner Andrian Holovaty found a way to collect what he needed to make this site through an automated script:

“Each weekday, my computer program goes to the Chicago Police Department’s website and gathers all crimes reported in Chicago.”

The site has some great info (such as this screenshot of “Armed Robbery: Handgun Incidents”), though I still want to see an editorial lens on this data that puts a bit more meaning behind it.

For example, it only takes a glance to see in this series of Census images of San Francisco that the City is incredibly segregated, something I think many residents choose to ignore under the mask of open-mindedness. Even here, though, the story is incomplete without some intelligence wrapped around the data. What’s the trend? Is it becoming whiter? Where are people going who are leaving?

This same question punctures my happy place every time I exit onto Palo Alto’s University Avenue from Highway 101 and pass what is now a high end office park where one of the most dangerous areas in the country used to exist only a decade or so ago. I’m very pleased it’s a safer place, but do we understand the cost of that transition? Where did those people go? Are they better off?

Yahoo! colleague Micah Laaker pointed me to an interesting project he worked on back in 2002 and 2003 called the Denver Census Tract Animation Project. He worked with Citizen Mapmakers to trend movement of the African-American population in Denver from 1960 to 2000. Here’s a snapshot of their work:

I really like the way they visualized data to tell a story here. We need similar visualizations for crime data.

The InfoPlease “School Shootings” site gets closer to telling a story about guns just by focusing on a type of statistic and representing it. What a powerful domain name! However, the data here is still pretty raw and limited. This is hugely important information, but there’s an implicit argument here that should be made much more explicit with actionable information and analysis. In its current state it’s just telling us that there are a lot of school shootings (a surprising number in Europe, actually).


The Citizen Crime Watch site for New Orleans gets even closer to what I want to see. Similar to ChicagoCrime.org, they visualize with your standard data-on-a-map mashup, but the hover links point to coverage in the local media. I’m suddenly given a much more human window into the crime scene, and I can read about each event. For example, on April 9, 2007, there was a homicide in a trailer park:

“…Officers found Williams lying on the floor of the trailer with blunt-force trauma to her head. Emergency medical technicians declared her dead at the scene. An autopsy shows she had been beaten to death, said John Gagliano, chief investigator for the Orleans Parish coroner’s office.

The trailer is in a trailer park at 6801 Press Drive run by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. Although the trailer park is near the campus of Southern University, the chancellor, Victor Ukpolo, said neither faculty nor students live there.

The murder is being investigated by Detective Harold Wischan, who can be reached at (504) 658-5300.”

I’m very thankful for local reporting from sites like Nola.com, The Times Picayune, and community leaders such as Mike Lin of PotreroHillSF and the increasingly active Yahoo! Group Potrero Hill Parents Association who all help surface this kind of information, but it’s not enough. The City needs make it easier for its residents to both report on things that matter to us and to collect the data, filter it, and act on it.

People will always want greater access to information. This is particularly true in communities where poor decision-making creates mistrust:

“Under pressure from constituents who say New Orleans police stonewall requests for crime data, the City Council’s criminal justice subcommittee took police representatives to task Wednesday, calling for a faster, freer flow of public information…When asked for a written breakdown of policy and procedures relating to the release of public information, Maj. Michael Sauter, the head of technology, told the council most of that information was ‘not meant for the public.'”

Similarly, Rick Klau has begun experimenting with this kind of thing in response to the Magnetix toy recall incident. He calls it “Open source parenting” and observes that bottom-up community-driven politics is likely to be more successful than anything a politician can enable:

“If the government is under-staffed and under-funded to help parents avoid harmful toys, then why can’t we help ourselves?…Give thousands of parents the tools to easily identify harmful products, leverage the community’s ability to provide visibility to legitimate threats while minimizing less serious risks, and quickly disseminate information that could be instrumental in avoiding a serious accident.”

I’m suddenly wondering what role politicans will play if communities are able to form solutions to issues locally, nationally and internationally on their own. Maybe instead of legislators (or merely professional campaigners/marketers), politicians will become community managers.

I also start wondering what politicians do all day if they can’t sort out ways to curb violence in our neighborhoods. I don’t see why anyone living in this country or any other should have to worry about whether their child will be shot accidentally in his or her bedroom by stray AK47 bullets or intentionally while at school.

I’m convinced the answer is in the data that is already being collected in various government crime databases. And I’m sure the answer is related to gun access.

Where is Tufte when you need him?