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Wednesday in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation announced the winners of its annual Knight News Challenge, a contest funding innovative ideas for disseminating news and information to local communities with digital technologies. 12 entrants were awarded a grand total of $2.74 million, the largest share, $400k, going to Eric Rodenbeck and his data visualization project CityTracking.

This morning I caught up with Chris Tolles, CEO of news aggregation service Topix. I've been following Topix since it began, back in 2004, so it was interesting to find out how the service has evolved. Originally, as the name suggests, Topix was focused on being a news site that categorized its content into topics. Nowadays Topix is very focused on localized news, particularly for small towns across America. Tolles said that 44% of their traffic comes from rural areas, rather than metropolitan areas.

Topix has also seen rapid growth in mobile access over the past year, from about 1% of their total traffic to 10% now. Tolles told me that 70% of that mobile traffic is coming from the iPhone.

Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay, announced this morning that he's closing down his Twitter client Ginx early next year and instead focusing on an online local news project. We reviewed a "private pre-alpha" version of Ginx in February and called it a dud. Ginx had some nice ideas but wasn't terribly innovative and it's finest points have now been reproduced in Twitter's own Lists.

Little is known yet about Peer News, Omidyar's next project, but an editor is being sought for hire. The project will begin in Hawaii, where Omidyar lives, but is intended to rock the journalist world.

Fwix, a website for local news, aims to be a "real-time local newswire" for your hometown. Offering a combination of traditional content pulled from newspapers and blogs along with items submitted by citizen journalists, the site reads more like a location-based lifestream than a typical news site. Key to the site's success will be the inclusion of user-generated content coming in from iPhone submissions. The company plans to launch an updated version of their Fwix iPhone application this week which will allow anyone to file news stories, photos, and videos from anywhere, all geo-tagged thanks to the iPhone's GPS location data.

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.