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Neighborhood news aggregator Outside.in has been acquired by AOL, according to multiple reports this morning. Apparently it's being bought for less than the big pile of money that high-profile investors put into it, back when hopes were high. It's sad, really: the ambitious hyper-local news technology services of the last few years don't seem to be working out very well.

Outside.in, EveryBlock and Fwix are the three sites best known for building out automated collection and analysis of news about particular neighborhoods of cities around the United States. There is huge, exciting potential there - but it takes resources to develop technology and media sites like this. Maybe a shortage of resources is why none of these sites are the thriving hub of activity that many people hoped they would be. There are many different theories why, but all three of the leading startups in this space feel like a disappointment so far.

Everyblock, the data-driven hyper-local news website covering 16 US cities, announced today that it has added continuing education listings from the website TeachStreet to its newsfeed. Now you can learn when there are new cooking or violin classes in your neighborhood, side-by-side with news of police activity, restaurant reviews and news stories about your area.

I love Everyblock and haven't paid enough attention to TeachStreet before, it looks good too. MSNBC owns Everyblock and it's an invaluable service, but each time a new data source gets added, a fundamental flaw in the user interface rears its head again. None the less, this is an exciting dataset to see added to the hyper-local news.

Hyperlocal news aggregator Everyblock announced today that it is releasing a firehose API to integrate its data into large partner sites. Everyblock brings together real time and near real-time public records like 911 calls, restaurant health inspections and building permits, as well as news stories and blog posts that discuss user-designated areas in 16 cities around the US. That stream of data will now be available upon request to integrate into the sites of other large publishers and otherwise make use of.

Everyblock was acquired by MSNBC in 2009 and came to my city of Portland, Oregon this Spring. Things haven't been the same since. Give me a Sunday morning and Everyblock on my iPad and I'm a happy guy.

The neighborhood boundary data provider used by Google, Twitter, EveryBlock, CitySearch and other companies has expanded to include top cities in South America, Middle East, Africa and Asia. Norwich, Vermont based Maponics says it now also offers deeper coverage for leading US and Canadian markets, with new neighborhoods in 100 cities.

Maponics says it is the first service to provide neighborhood boundaries on every populated continent on earth.

A fight just broke out down the street from my house. Yesterday, a dog in my neighborhood had one of its legs amputated. That's the kind of news I like to know and so I'm very excited that MSNBC's hyper-local news aggregator EveryBlock has expanded this week to include services in Portland, Oregon.

EveryBlock is one of scores of competing services that serve up public records, social media content and local announcements on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood, or in this case block-by-block, basis. What does it mean when the most successful of these services rolls into your town? 12 hours into the experience, here's what some people in the local (human) media geeks have to say about it. This conversation offers a unique view into the front-line battle to offer news consumers more and faster information about our own neighborhoods than we've probably ever had before.

Holding down the proverbial fort for the mid-west, Chicago, the Windy City, is the third largest city in the U.S. and the most populous city that doesn't sit on an ocean coast. The city, which does, however, rest on the shore of Lake Michigan, is home to a unique culture of nearly 3 million people and countless numbers of Fortune 500 companies condensed into its 234 square miles of city. Though the city is often passed over for Silicon Valley and New York in terms of startup cultures, Chicago has a expanding repertoire of companies, entrepreneurs, investors and organizations helping put the city on the startup map.

As struggling newspapers file for bankruptcy left and right, the quest is on to find the new business models for news consumption in a new digital age. Recently the New York Times announced that it has begun investigating and testing a system for placing some of their content behind pay walls based on a daily allowance of free articles, but this may just be a new spin on an old trick. Entrepreneurs are needed to help the news industry as it shifts online, and that's precisely who the Knight Digital Media Center (KDMC) is targeting for an expenses paid seminar this May.

Until now, all the news on the hyperlocal news site EveryBlock was compiled by the site's editors and algorithms. Today, EveryBlock launched a nifty new feature that allows its users to post stories to the site and notify their neighbors about interesting events in their neighborhoods. The new feature allows users to post anything from news alerts to questions and classified ads on the site. These alerts will also now appear in EveryBlock's newly enhanced iPhone app (iTunes link).

Outside.in is a hyper-local news aggregator and when they say hyper-local they mean it - the site captures news, blog posts and other resources right down to the neighborhood level. The company announced tonight that it's raised a nice round of funding, $7 million from CNN, the super-hip VC at Union Square Ventures, real-time savvy VC shop Betaworks and several other organizations. Both of the aforementioned are existing investors re-investing.

Tonight the Outside.in site told me about a new real-estate valuation report for the neighborhood I just bought a house in, a city permit request by a local college planing to subdivide a big residential lot on the beautiful old street I walk my dogs on and some cool jobs in the neighborhood. What more could I ask for? Long term viability and an expanded staff for a service like this? That sounds great.

MSNBC.com just announced that it has acquired EveryBlock, a 'hyperlocal' news and information site that has been publishing and aggregating data and news stories for 16 American cities for the last two years. EveryBlock aggregates local news stories, but it also makes publicly available information like data about restaurant inspections and crimes available in an easy to read format. EveryBlock had been funded by a two-year grant from the Knight Foundation. This is MSNBC.com's second major acquisition, having bought the social news site Newsvine in October 2007.