I am seeking to gain institutional support from my employer for blogging in local government. As I am still building my case and trying to explain the concept of link-building and content aggregators for developing a robust informational ecosystem, I am realizing the need for some sort of content aggregator that is localized.
When talking about content aggregators, I mean all those web-based, Web 2.0 applications listed in the “Share This” link above. Of course the most common are
Do any of these content aggregator services have localization capabilities? A Digg-like system for aggregating stories whose audience are the community in Arlington County, VA (for example) would be fantastic. Functionality enabling content aggregation and search for blog posts pertinent to Arlington would be very beneficial to Arlington and to local governments across the country in general.
Tagging with “Arlington” is a temporary solution, but it may not capture all geographical entities (keywords) within Arlington:
- Communities (colloquially named)
- Communities (officially recognized)
- Zipcodes
- Counties
- States
Identifying stories by IP address also has its limitations as the aggregator could easily pick up stories from surrounding jurisdictions in the Metropolitan Washington DC Area. And, as far as I can tell, geotagging web content, apart from photos, has not quite caught on yet. I see some potential there though.
Social Networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, Friendster) perhaps do the best in this arena. However, FaceBook’s neighborhood application, as far as I can tell, will only allow you to reside in one neighborhood at a time. Does anyone have any suggestions for how to accomplish such a task once FaceBook opens its code and allows application hosting on individual websites. How about with other Open-Social tools?
In the meantime, I will have to rely on my RSS-reader to aggregate my content for me. This webpage provides links to all the RSS-enabled feeds in Arlington County that I could find.
