YourStreet - Read local neighboorhood news on a Google map

Posted on November 15, 2007 at 1:57 pm

Make sure to read other posts from the Real Estate Listings series!

Find real estate, homes for sale, and recently sold properties with Trulia
Find local real estate listings with integrated neighboorbood information
Use Walk Score to find houses and apartments in the best neighborhoods
YourStreet - Read local neighboorhood news on a Google map

Like reading the local news for your city or locality? Or maybe you live somewhere where you actually get the local news for just your own neighborhood? If you’re one of those lucky few, then the service I’m going to mention may not be quite useful. However, if you want to experience your local news in a different way than the conventional newspaper or TV news, you should check out a service called YourStreet.

YourStreet is basically a Google mashup that allows you to read news, blogs, articles, and conversations on a map! The service constantly indexes news sites and blogs and plots them onto a map. You can therefore get news related to not only your city, but also your neighborhood and even your street!

Their advanced algorithm indexes thousands of articles a day and analyzes the articles to find out specific locations in the body of the text. They use the MetaCarta service to help with location identification. So the next time an article appears that mentions a house burning at a specific address, YourStreet would plot that onto it’s map! Neat!

And just like a Google map, you can zoom in and zoom out to see articles from different parts of the city. You can also choose from today, last 7 days, last 30 days, or last 90 days.

Once you type in your address, you’ll see three types of “buttons” appear on the map: News (blue), Conversations (green), and Neighbors (Orange). As you can see from above, clicking on one of the blue icons brings up a list of local news items picked from various sources.

I was quite impressed with some of the news because it included stories like the fact that an 18-wheeler had broken down 2 days earlier and caused all kinds of traffic for hours, something that was not in the local TV news. It was probably in the paper, but I prefer to get my news from online now anyway!

You can also read the news in a list format directly below the map, which gives a short synopsis of the article also.

YourStreet also has a customization and social networking aspect to it as you can create a profile and as others join the service, they will show up as neighbors (if they live close to you). Also, you can comment on news items and also start conversations to discuss any news article you like.

Overall, the service is very unique and practical to use in that it has enough sources to find a good number of local articles for even small cities like New Orleans. As more people join, it could also be a cool place to post opinions on local politics, events, etc. Enjoy! Source Shankrila

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