By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor
Mapping out the news is becoming a booming business for online companies as one supplier unveiled a new service while another one made its debut in three cities.
Last month, mapping software vendor MetaCarta Inc. introduced GeoTagger OnDemand, a hosted service that identifies the places and points of interest mentioned in text documents, Web pages and blogs and relates them to their appropriate latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates.
The service allows geographic points to be automatically displayed on maps, retrieved through a variety of search engines or dynamically displayed with other geographically relevant content.
YourStreet, www.yourstreet.com, is the first customer to use GeoTagger OnDemand. The site aggregates stories from more than 10,000 newspapers, magazines and local blogs and links those stories to specific geographic locations that in turn can be meshed with neighborhood-specific social networks.
Free service
The service is free and once users are registered, they can begin conversations about places in their area and connect with neighbors who have signed up for the service, said James Nicholson, chief executive officer and founder.
“YourStreet is transforming the way users experience local news by indexing and mapping thousands of articles, blogs, and conversations down to the street level,” he said. “We scan thousands of newspaper sites and local blogs each day and use MetaCarta to help with location identification.”
In addition to YourStreet, MetaCarta said Lowell Publishing Co. will roll out its Local Alerts mapping software to underpin its Web operations.
The Local Alerts software, delivers personalized news and information.
LPC publishes the Sun and the Valley Dispatch, both in Lowell, Mass., as well as the Sentinel & Enterprise in Fitchburg, Mass., the Broadcaster in Nashua, N.H., and a number of weekly publications.
The LPC agreement follows a deployment of the software by The San Antonio Express-News, which rolled out Local Alerts last year.
New kid on block
Meantime, MetaCarta has been joined in the mapping marketplace by start-up EveryBlock.com, which launched in Chicago, New York and San Francisco in January. The site, developed by Web designer Adrian Holoyaty, is funded in part by a Knight News Challenge grant.
The company’s aim is to collect news and civic information and sort it out geographically, by neighborhood and city block.
Users can read news and information that includes government data, crime reports, restaurant inspections and other public records data.
It also meshes with social networking features found from such sites as Flickr, a photo-sharing site; local business reviews from Yelp and missed connections — a personals section — from Craigslist.
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