On the Net: Seeing the World, Missing What's Going on Around Me

Kevin Maney hopes: Is it actually possible to create a really good, really useful hyper-local Web site? Because so far, nobody has -- and I want one.

Today, blogger-slash-venture capitalist Fred Wilson plugs one of his portfolio companies, outside.in. It pulls in all kinds of content -- blogs, entertainment listings, news stories -- and tags it with geographical information. The idea is that if you pull up your neighborhood, the site will assemble all the content that's pertinent to your immediate vicinity. But, as often happens with these kinds of automated things, the result is a mish-mash of stuff with widely varying degrees of quality and appropriateness. (And, for that matter, my decent-size town in the Washington DC suburbs doesn't even show up on the site.)

The grand goal of outside.in and most of these sites is to create a site that works even half as well as asking your neighbor what's going on in the neighborhood. It's just not happening.

There are lots of attempts going on. You can try OurTown. Doesn't do it. Some local newspapers are going all out in this direction. Actually, they should OWN this idea, but so far have barely scratched the surface.

I want to go to a site and say, I'm here, and here are the topics I'm interested in: high school sports, traffic, weather, new restaurants, live music, police reports, yard sales. Pull those things in from wherever you have to -- the high school Web site, traffic cams, Craigslist, the local free weekly paper. Then mash it up with a Google Map so I can visually see where things are.

Anybody working on that?