Turning my thoughts this week to local – hyperlocal to be more exact. Starting with a trip to Teesside to see the Middlesbrough Gazette’s award-winning hyperlocal offering and still continuing online.
It seems such a downright obvious thing to serve up news that is on a user’s doorstep. The minutiae of life that’s important because it is happening to YOU.
That’s why I’ve called titled this post in such a provocative way. If your neighbour really was in court, you would want to know. Wouldn’t you? Even a slapped wrist or an unpaid fine would be of interest despite not winning any ‘scoop of the year’ gongs. (Anyway, serial killer would be just plain alarming and think of the property prices!)
And property prices is where all this hyperlocal user education started. If you want to know something about your area, as a user you automatically go for the postcode. Upmystreet, Google maps . The clever bods at Teesside recognised that and are reportedly reaping the rewards with audiences and advertisers.
As someone from Boro recently told me about their experiment: “It’s great. Like Facebook – but better!”. Praise indeed.
But that’s the exception and it’s achieved by manually sorting content into postcode areas rather than by any technological wizardry.
So why then are most of the online solutions to providing hyperlocal news for a UK audience so poor at present?
Is it the fact that the technology is not quite there? The fact that most American towns and cities share names is a complicating factor as anyone whose been frustrated with attempting to get news on Topix , Google news et al will know.
But, of course, the news stories coming out in an online search can only be as good as the data going in, so is the issue just a case of lack of geotagging data at the source?
It was reported that Northcliffe have been working on this so it will be interesting to see if that prompts changes across the industry and surely advances such as this technology to geotag live video will move this issue on.
I’d be really interested to find out how many mainstream media companies do geotag their content, at what point in the process and how it’s proved useful or otherwise.
Some more links on this topic here;
Dim Sum Digital 