(Thanks Jon Ramer)

Gideon Rosenblatt‚Äö√Ñ√¥s Blog contains a post that discusses how new online technologies may soon create an “explosion” of localized information online. Rosenblatt wites:

A few years from now;
maybe quite a few years from now admittedly, but one or more of my
neighbors is going to start blogging about what.s happening in our
neighborhood. Seeing him or her do that might actually motivate me to
post a few myself that are tied to things going on in the neighborhood.
Easy enough to do, but what’s missing right now is an easy way to find
them. Chris Anderson touches on the importance of discoverability
toward the end of his Long Tail article
but I think this is really one the critical factors behind the whole
concept. Finding news that is really local just isn’t that easy right
now, but Google getting into mapping services along with Amazon with its A9 search engine
with mapping capabilities suggest to me that this is about to change
very quickly. I would be shocked if they don.t eventually come up with
solutions that make it easy to tag certain sites and individual content
chunks with some sort of geo-coding. When that happens, the Local Tail
will explode.

Rosenblatt speculates that this will not only have an effect on the way that we consume local news and informaiton, but that it may also affect our civic and political nature and discourse.

It’s true that plenty of online virual communities exist online wherin people can share information and discuss and plan onlocal levels. But, there is currently a lack of readily available information in most communities about any number of localized states and conditions (financial, environmental, social, etc).

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