At first glance, this seems to be a great new tool to streamline the flow of information between our online and offline worlds. But how well does Google's new local mobile search work in reality?

This video from the Google team shows more about how to star certain locations in Google Maps while at a computer and use the different features of local search for mobile:

Sounds great, right?

But when we tried to use Google's local search tab on a mobile device, some of the results we got were strange and disappointing. We were searching for "coffee" and "WiFi" in southeastern Virginia, and the top result was for the Hotel Taj Bengal Kolkat in West Bengal. And although we do enjoy the Cafe de Paris in Monte Carlo, we do not think this was an appropriate second result for local search in Virginia.

When we narrowed our search to just "coffee", we got better results, but who wants just coffee with no WiFi?

Next, we tried browsing the categories, again with mixed results. The ability to access saved and recent searches, however, was stellar and is probably users' best bet for getting around to local businesses while on-the-go.

Local EveryBlock sites are currently available for Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, Charlotte, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Philadelphia, San Francisco, San Jose, Seattle, and Washington, D.C. While a number of other companies, including Outside.in, for example, also aggregate local news from blogs and mainstream news sources, EveryBlock stands out because of how well it displays local information from public records. For example, the site aggregates data about everything from building permits and police calls to liquor license status changes and excavation permits - data that is generally hidden away on government websites that are often hard to navigate.

EveryBlock's source code is freely available under the GPL license. The site was built on top of the Django framework.

Great for Cities - But not for Sights

While this worked quite well for the examples Google gives in its blog post, a few of our other searches ('Yosemite National Park' for example), did not bring up any photos. Any search for a city, however, always gave us related images from the photo layer in Google Maps. Searches for local restaurants and sites typically don't bring up any images and searches for local sights already brought up search results from Google Images anyway, and from what we can see, nothing has changed there.

It's nice to see, however, that Google now surfaces more images. It is also worth pointing out that yesterday, Google also announced that users can now easily filter Google Images by Creative Commons license, which, until now, was really the domain of Yahoo's Flickr, which hosts the world's largest repository of CC-licensed images.

Competing With Bing

Of course, we also can't help but think that the fact that Google is facing renewed competition from Bing, which also does a nice job of mixing up images with local search results - though not quite as nicely as Google now does. Travel is one of the areas where Bing excels, and it is good to see that the competition in this market is driving all players to innovate and improve their services.

These days, everywhere you look it seems that some newspaper is closing its doors, stopping its presses, or maybe just going online-only. This sea of change is being heralded by some as the "death of journalism," a transformation that has been brought about thanks to the web. But is the web really killing journalism? Or, is it allowing an entirely new type of journalism to emerge?

At last week's Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, we had an opportunity to sit down with David and ask him about the project, what's been happening with it, and where he sees it going. 

The "Death of Journalism?" Not so fast. We would say that the internet is leading us to the future instead.

About Spot.us

Spot.us is a non-profit startup which distributes the cost of hiring a journalist across a community of people. Based in the San Francisco Bay area, Spot.us has already funded stories where journalists have investigated things like the local police department, poverty issues, and city budgetary issues.

After a story is funded and the final copy is turned in, Spot.us will try to sell the first publishing rights. If that happens, then any money they make goes back to the original donors so they can reinvest in another story. If Spot.us is not able to sell the first publishing rights, they will then release the story under Creative Commons so anyone can publish it.

Spot.us is currently funded through a grant, but they also ask the community to donate an additional $2 when funding a particular story. This money goes to the organization itself and will hopefully allow it to expand to other cities. But, if you don't want to wait for Spot.us to come to your town, you can start your own version instead. The Spot.us code is open source, so you could launch a site like this for your own community.

In the end, what David Cohn hopes to prove is that, indeed, "journalism will survive the death of its institutions." With Spot.us, he shows us that there is another way to keep the industry alive, even after the papers fail.

Thanks to Nokia's partnership with Kring, their upcoming Ovi Store (aka the Nokia App Store) is going to kick off with some of the most innovative content that has ever come to the mobile platform. It's set to open in May soon after the store will feature Kring's new project and is code-named TEVA. As for what exactly TEVA will look like and what it will be about...well, details are still vague. Kring wants to make sure spoilers don't ruin the fun for the audience...or perhaps we should say "participants."

ARG Explained

What we do know, however, is that TEVA will be a combination of user-generated content and Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG). In you're unaware of what "ARG" means, it's when an interactive narrative is told using the real world as the platform. Instead of passively consuming this sort of entertainment, ARG players actively participate in it. A somewhat recent example of this is what ARG called the "Lost Experience," which launched back in 2008 as an online clue hunt developed by ABC for fans of the TV show "Lost." In this game, web sites across the net contained clues that when pieced together told a story that tied into and paralleled that of the show. Another example would be the ARG created for the band Nine Inch Nails to promote their "Year Zero" album. This time the adventure started when concert goers found thumb drives in the bathrooms that contained unreleased songs and clues.

TEVA is No Ordinary ARG

So the idea of an ARG isn't an entirely new one, but using the mobile platform to play the game is...at least like this. You see, TEVA isn't just a traditional ARG moved to the mobile platform - it only involves some elements of that type of story-telling mechanism. Another piece to this mobile experience is user-generation content. This is a new twist. In the past, ARG players would just interact with the story line - now they're going to help create it. And yet another aspect to this mobile experience will be local. Gameplay takes place in your city - not just in an application or just on the web. How exactly this happens, we don't know, but TEVA will use GPS and other location-based services in some way. 

So What Do We Call This?

When we asked if there was a name for this type of entertainment, Kring said perhaps we could call it a "mobile immersive experience." It's a bit long, but it works.

Since there aren't a ton of details about TEVA yet, we have to use our imaginations to guess at what sort of interactions might be included. Based on some of the other discussion topics that evening, one of the possibilities that may come into play in this new mobile experience is an augmented reality application.

At the dinner, one of the Nokia execs described how we could use our mobile phones to record geo-located images and videos and tag them with specific keywords. This media could then only be accessed when you arrived in the same geo-location with your mobile phone. For example, if you showed up at the local park, you could pull up a video of your friends playing Frisbee there last week. This "mirror world," as it is being called, isn't so much an "alternate" reality, but a real one...just one that's been recorded, tagged, and archived. With this, we sort of become the ghosts of ourselves.

The Possibilities are Endless

The TEVA project will initially launch in the Ovi Store while it's being developed for other mediums (iPhone? Web? This, too, is unknown.) What is known, though, is that Kring is extremely excited about the project. As a creative, he's less interested in the technical details of the technology itself - just what it can do and how he can use it to create an entirely new entertainment experience.

Kring noted that there are already mobile applications that allow you to go out into the real world and "collect clues, send things, create things, and share with other people nearby...using the locative qualities of the phone. Once you get the parameters of what these services can do," he continued, "then your imagination is the only thing that stops you...if you attach a narrative to that."

TEVA will launch this summer and will be rolled out regionally.

Above image is the TEVA logo.

The post informed advertisers that they now had access to two of the most frequently requested targeting filters: language targeting and location targeting. Obviously, the language targeting makes sense, especially considering that Facebook is currently available in 40 languages with over 60 more in development. In fact, it's somewhat surprising that this feature was not available until now.

When a particular language is entered into a box on the ad signup form, the approximate reach of the selection will appear at the bottom. For example, if an advertiser enters in a location of "United States" and the language "Spanish," the approximate reach will display 1,081,820 - the number of Spanish-speaking Facebook users in the States.

Facebook Knows Where You Live

However, it's the location-based targeting which is the most interesting of the two updates. Here, advertisers can narrow their focus in order to target users within a certain mile radius of a particular location. This feature is currently available only in the U.S., the U.K., and Canada for targeting cities and/or targeting within 10, 25, or 50 miles of the cities selected.

With this feature, advertisers can tap into the detailed demographics that Facebook users so willingly share along with their age, sex, relationship status, educational background, etc. (You didn't really think you were just filling that info out to share with friends, did you?)

Will Hyperlocal Ads Come Next?

As advertisers better learn to target narrower sets of users, we wonder if it's only a matter of time before Facebook introduces a mobile, location-based component to their network which would allow users share their exact (or nearly exact) location within a city. Imagine the possibilities for extreme hyperlocal ads then! What if advertisers could target all the users who updated how they were sipping lattes at Starbucks, for instance? Or perhaps the ads could target users who posted that they've checked in at a Vegas hotel for a big conference? These are the sorts of niche demographics that advertisers can only dream about now, but the technology already exists to enable that level of precision.

Today, a handful of early-adopters are currently sharing this type of information through Facebook's News Feed and status updates courtesy of the mobile social networking service Brightkite. If you're friends with any Brightkite users, you'll likely see the location updates pop into your feeds from time to time thanks to that service's ability to integrate with Facebook by way of Facebook Connect. This relatively new authentication technology allows users to log into the Brightkite service with their Facebook account and then shoot their updates from Brightkite back into their profiles. If Facebook advertisers could tap into the sort of niche demographics that Brightkite could give access to, it could open up a whole world of possibilities for hyperlocal ad targeting.

The only stumbling block to implementing this type of targeting is the same one that always comes up: those pesky users and their sense of privacy. Would Facebook users revolt if, all of a sudden, Facebook knew exactly where they were and served up ads that did too? The Facebook ads seem creepy enough now as they're often far more accurate and relevant than some users are comfortable with. What would hyperlocal ads look like then? Far creepier, we would imagine. "Do you really need that second Frappuccino? Why not head to the gym instead - it's only 3 blocks away!" Yikes.

But while it's true that some users would balk at that level of invasiveness, others would welcome it. In fact, Facebook is actively cultivating a sense among its users that going online is no longer a private activity. By tucking away their privacy controls deep within their settings, they're encouraging the average user to overshare personal information with people who would have never known them in that way before - people like mom, dad, and the boss, for example.

In time, the sense of openness Facebook fosters among a person's social - and perhaps professional - network will wear away at that sense of privacy until users aren't just tolerant of these hyperlocal ads, they will welcome them and they'll expect them. Google's recent foray into more targeted advertising will only help further this cause, too.

Of course, in this imagined scenario, Facebook users who want to maintain their privacy would be able to do so - they could just opt-out of the feature. But maintaining online privacy is something that will, over time, become harder and harder to do. There will be more settings to adjust, more configuring of block lists, and more checkboxes to mark. Most users won't bother with it - they will just adjust to the changes and to the new reality of the smarter (and yes, perhaps scarier) ads.

People increasingly look for reasons to avoid traveling, knowing we will get crowds, intrusive security, a bland sameness everywhere, crumbling infrastructure that could be dangerous and to top it all a smidgeon of guilt about our carbon footprint. When travel looks like fun, it is “off the beaten track”, in some place that does not look like everywhere else, a genuinely local place.

Living “off the grid” was once a dream for a few wild hippies, toking in yurts in the Mojave desert. Now we can see three “straws in the wind” that indicate that this is turning mainstream:

1. Silicon Valley A List VCs are financing the solar energy products to enable all of us to cut off our dependency on the electricity grid.

2. The work from home generation increasingly takes a world without commuting to Dilbert cubicles for granted; reducing our dependency on highways and mass transportation. In that more local world, we can get about by foot, bicycle or maybe electric car; we are also more likely to interact with and care about local shopkeepers and other suppliers.

3. Consumers increasingly value local and hand-made as special, for which they are willing to pay a premium; consumers want the opposite of mass-produced. We increasingly distrust the industrial food that comes from the Meatrix and a book about sustainable agriculture hits the bestseller lists. Local food is the new black, “better than organic“.

Taken together, these trends are being referred to as re-localization. An alternative name is Local 2.0. The difference is subtle but real.

Local 2.0 is clearly Web 2.0 type thinking. The big focus is on location based services. The classic use case is a traveler, a stranger in a strange land who has just landed and wants to find something or somebody (who might help them find something). As we all rush around the country/world pitching to clients/investors/partners or hanging out at cool un-conferences, that is an important use case; but it is different from Re-localization.

Re-localization is about locals. It is about people who like being in one place and interacting with neighbors. This does not make it a closed world. Local shopkeepers/restaurants/cafes welcome the stranger/traveler/tourist with their credit card. Realtors, plumbers and all kinds of small businesses welcome the newcomer, who may put down roots here and become a regular customer.

In Web 1.0, these local businesses were viewed as roadkill. Everything would be ordered online and delivered by air and trucks from giant automated warehouses. Oops, lousy economics; plus increasing consumer push-back. So now Web 2.0 start-ups want to “partner” with these local businesses.

“Partner” is a term we fling about carelessly in technology/media circles; it is a thoroughly devalued term. Use it with a local shopkeeper and she will ask you how many dollars you plan to invest with her in this new business that you will jointly own.

What we really mostly mean is “we would like to sell you some advertising”. After delivering your pitch for a paradigm-changing local ad service, you will hear something about Yellow Pages or Classified Ads in the local paper; well, you would hear that if you were actually in conversation. Many will tell you they don’t bother - “the locals already know me”. Others will say they have always used the local paper/directory “because Harry is a great guy, no idea if it works, but don’t plan to change”. So then you switch your pitch to something about visitors and the pitch degenerates into something pretty marginal.

Selling to real small businesses at a local level, means having a little cheat sheet to remind you of three basic facts:

1. People don’t live online. Re-localization is all about human interaction face to face. If you think community = online…ahem, get a life! MeetUp looks like a big winner in this environment. Mobile is a big deal, but you will be hard pressed to offer something more compelling than hitting autodial to tell your friend what cafe you are in.
2. Small business owners are traders. Trade with them. Buy from them or sell something to them that they can sell to their customers. I know that sounds kinda basic. To put it in fancier media/technology language, there is a value chain that leads from CPM to CPC to CPA to transaction fees. Ebay gets that and they are as mainstream as it gets.
3. When the local business wants to look at an online alternative to Yellow Pages/local paper, Craigslist is right there and virtually free and they have crossed the chasm. Count me a skeptic of the local ad market; Craigslist took the air out of that one.

Here is the little secret. Local business people are plenty smart (even if they don’t know what Drupal is) and the Web just made them smarter. They can get together with other small businesses to compete more effectively against the Fortune 500 behemoths who turned America into a shopping mall. They will use the Net to trade with their peers; enable that in some way and you may have a winner.

The Net is also critical to re-localization because it brings the “distant independent digital worker” who relies on broadband and smart tools to communicate with colleagues/partners/clients globally. They bring new revenue into the local economy.

What do you think? Do you like your local bookshop or are you Amazon only? If you ran a local small business, what Net based service would you find most useful?

Image by StuffEyeSee

At I Feel London, I Feel NYC, and IFeelToronto, you can find activities, nightlife, shops, dining, bars, and more based on how you feel: energetic, chilled, manly, sophisticated, romantic, naughty, manly, and even broke. After clicking on your current feeling, the different types of activities appear on the Google map with customized pushpins that match the feeling. For example, "girly" pushpins are a set of smoochy lips, "hungover" pushpins are really dark shades.

The maps are hardly comprehensive guides to the cities, but that's OK since they're open for collaboration. You can help fill in their gaps by requesting an invite to the various Google maps being created. Although only three maps are live now, there are nine maps in total being worked on at this time.

You might think the maps are just someone's nifty side project, but to Andy, they represent much more than that. He notes, "Although it's tempting to focus on how technology can enable new behavior, I'm more interested in how it can remove barriers to behaving in ways we are programmed to do. Mood - or state of mind - seems to me to be the most fundamental trigger for human action."

To address these cultural differences, the Mozilla Online in Beijing created Firefox China Edition (beta), a web browser designed with the needs of the Chinese web surfers in mind.

The browser contains several features which make it useful for Chinese users, including:

• New mouse-based controls for common functions that are often invoked by shortcut keys in North America and Europe, which isn't as common a habit of Chinese users
• Some Maxthon-parity features such as the ability to close a tab using double-click
• A drop-down button on the toolbar for launching common system utilities like a calculator, a notepad, a screenshot grabber and an image editor (editing images and pasting screenshots is a very common activity in China). Maxthon is usually included on the CD with the pirated copy of Windows XP that many Chinese have installed.
• A new sidebar called "Live Margins" which allows the user to drag any highlighted text to open a new drill-down search which will show you semantically relevant content as well as allow you to store pictures, videos and music you encounter so you can return to it or play it from the sidebar without interrupting your usual browsing tasks. (This sidebar is also available as the Juice addon - for more info, see our review).  

These features are all bundled together in the software known as Firefox China Edition, an optional download for Chinese web users. It is not intended to replace the version of Firefox shipped in China, only offer extra functionality if one so chooses to install it.

In a way, the China Edition reminds us a bit of Fashion Your Fox, the specialized collections of addons for the different types of web surfers. However, where Fashion Your Fox only provides links to addons, Firefox China Edition is the whole Firefox browser, preloaded with addons and extra features.

It will be interesting to see how many Chinese web surfers download this beta software. If successful, we may see more localized browsers appear in the future. 

You can fine the new beta at beta.citysearch.com.

More Local

Besides giving the service a cleaner and more modern look, Citysearch also retooled the back-end to allow users to perform more granular searches. While the old Citysearch was only focused on 140 metropolitan areas, the new version allows you to drill down to the neighborhood level.

Social

The new version of Citysearch puts more emphasis on the social experience by highlighting reviews from your Facebook friends while browsing through reviews. Besides making the sign-in easier for new users, Citysearch now also allows you to publish your updates on the service to your Facebook profile. On the service itself, setting up a profile has now become easier, though you can't really do too much with these profiles besides adding your profile picture.

Users can now also vote reviews up or down, which is a nice feature, given that some reviews can be blatantly biased.

The update also puts more emphasis on professionally produced videos of local establishments. The new player, which is provided by BrightCove, allows for wide-screen HD playback, which is a nice upgrade from the old version.

Mobile

Early next year, Citysearch will start to allow users to upload their own photos and videos to the service. Citysearch also expects to release a native iPhone application around the same time, though for now, the updated mobile site is already quite useful.

Overall, this is a nice update to Citysearch and puts the service back on par with its competitors. In the mobile market, however, review services like Yelp or discovery services like Whrll have a head-start and it will be interesting to see if Citysearch's mobile site can compete with these.

Near.ly uses the new API to deliver a headline and a link to the news item using a bit.ly-powered URL, which just so happens to be our favorite URL shortening program. To use near.ly, you must first register then provide your Twitter username and password to the service. The service verifies your identity and automatically follows the "nearlybot" so you can begin receiving the messages. You can choose to unfollow the nearlybot at anytime if you want to stop receiving the news.

There are a number of ways to get local news information from the web, but none are quite as personal and direct as having links to news twittered to you. But as much as we love the idea of getting local news via Twitter, we're even more excited to see what other apps will built with the new Outside.in API.

Outside.in API Intro from outside.in on Vimeo.

Still Limited

While we have little doubt that mobile social networking will become a big market in the future, today's reality is still rather bleak. Because of the limitations in the current hardware and software implementations, a lot of the location-based social networks like Loopt, WhosHere, Pelago's Whrrl, and others feel limited and at times rather gimmicky.

Also, most of these networks simply suffer from the fact that they don't have many users and that the chances of finding any of your friends on them are relatively low for now.

What About the Established Networks?

In the near future, mobile social networking is only really going to grow once the big social networks like Facebook, MySpace, Orkut, LinkedIn, or MyYearBook start releasing location-aware applications for mobile devices.

Overall, we don't put too much stock into the ABI report. Thanks to highly targeted location-based advertising, there is a good chance that a mobile social network that manages to attract enough users (or any of the already establish social networks that releases a location aware application) will be able to be financially successful. For right now, however, with a market that is barely establish, trying to put a number on the potential success of these networks is almost silly.

That makes sense given that analysts have predicted that local ad spending will jump 48% this year to $12.6 billion. The majority of those ads will be search advertising, but clearly, local information is hot with consumers. We've written about the rise of hyperlocal information on ReadWriteWeb before -- Huffington and company are seeking to take advantage of this trend. They want to turn the Huffington Post into a national, virtual newspaper group -- think Gannett or McClatchy but completely online.

And that makes sense, too. A comScore study that we reported on in March revealed that 38% of those between the ages of 18 and 24 are unlikely to read a physical newspaper during a typical week, but non-news readers are still voracious consumers of news. They just get their news online -- and not just from traditional newspaper sites.

"Non-newspaper readers are a particularly important segment to reach because they are heavier than average news consumers - they just prefer to consume it in a digital format," said comScore executive vice president Jack Flanagan. "That they are receptive to print, TV, and Internet news brands indicates a broad opportunity online, but the brands that will ultimately win over these key news consumers are the ones that successfully integrate cutting edge digital content with high quality journalism." Clearly, that is a message that HuffPo gets -- their tag line is "The Internet Newspaper: News Blogs Video Community," and Arianna Huffington said last night that much of their venture funding will go toward building out a team of reporters. Last year they hired BBC reporter Elinor Shields to become the sites managing editor.

However, the Huffington Post is an edited aggregator -- a team of editors oversees the site and specifically decides what links get space on the sites, writes headlines by hand, selects images, etc. Last year I wrote for a competitor to the Huffington Post in the political news blogosphere, and from first hand experience I can tell you that it is hard work to gather and post news links and manage original and wire content. It will be interesting to see if HuffPo will be able to scale their local strategy to compete with automated local news aggregators like Outsite.in and YourStreet (our coverage).

Image credit: jdlasica

But now the Leader Board features the top twitterers in each of these top cities, too. This new feature was pointed out in a Silicon Florist blog post, where Rick Turoczy said that the TwitterLocal Leader Board represented "one of the most compelling slicing-and-dicings of the Twitter types" he's seen.

To access the Twitter rankings for a city, you can click on the city from the TwitterLocal Leader Board's list of cities. But what's great is that even if your city isn't listed on the Leader Board, you're not left out. You can just type in your city's name and do a search from the homepage instead. On the results page for your city, you'll see the top twitterers from your very own hometown.

However, it should be noted that the TwitterLocal top twitterers aren't ranked in quite the same way as other big sites, like Twitterholic, rank Twitter users - that is, by followers, friends, and updates. The TwitterLocal top twitterers are ranked solely by number of tweets in the past 24 hours.

Top Tweeters from San Fransisco

"There are literally millions of blogs, but only a few get any readership. Trying to attract the local population to your blog may be a very difficult task. Trying to make them participate is even harder," writes ZetaPrints, who believe that the print edition was a key to success for the Flying Pickle. Each week the blog selects its best posts and prepares them in a A5-sized, newsletter that it then places in letterboxes in the three local communities it targets. The total population for the area the blog serves is about 6,500.

Very quickly, the blog saw participation grow to about 6% of the local population and comments on the posts increased. Initially, the blog drafted volunteers from its core audience to help distribute the newsletter, but they have since switched to paid, professional distribution.

How could a local blog in such a tiny community do so well in face of stiff competition from established local newspapers? ZetaPrints thinks the key has been the print edition. Though they don't specifically speculate on why that is, it may be that having an actual, tangible product encourages people to contribute. And keeping it hyper-local makes it more manageable and may make people more comfortable voicing their opinions -- everyone is an expert about the neighborhood they live in.

Studies last year indicated that local ad spending would jump by as much as 48% in 2008. Indeed the Flying Pickle has been able to sell advertising in their print edition (it doesn't allow advertising on the web site). Perhaps more local or niche blogs should look to print to help grow their audience.