Hi, I'm Lauren Sperber. I'm a product manager at Outside.in. We just finished our API on Wednesday, so you're the first people to hear about it!
Outside.in is a hyperlocal news aggregator. That's a bunch of buzzwords that mean…
We crawl tens of thousands of data feeds and analyze their content for regions and places. This allows us to organize local news stories by the locations they're about.
So on our site, we have a page with all the stories in New York City, one with stories just about Manhattan… ,
…a page with stories just about the East Village…
And even a page with stories that are just about Union Square Park.
Our API exposes this geographically organized news that can be added to your own applications and sites.
You can give us the name of a state, a city, a ZIP code, or a neighborhood…
…we'll provide you with metadata about that location, such as its geographic center-point, our UUID for the location, and any regions that contain it…
…and we'll also return by default the last 10 stories that we associated with that location. You can use a limit parameter to decrease or increase the number of stories returned between 1 and 100. For every story, we give you its title, the first 200 characters, its permalink URL, the name and homepage of the source that published it, and all the topic tags we associated with the story.
If that's too much for you, you can add parameters that refine your results by the timespan within which you want to see stories; a keyword found in the title, summary, or tags; or how we’ve classified the feeds from which they came. This last set of parameters is actually very powerful. We've categorized all the feeds we process in a three-part taxonomy that includes: vertical (typical categorizations such as crime and news); format (which distinguishes between blog posts, traditional news stories, and event listings); and author type (which indicates if the story was published by a mainstream media outlet, a regular joe blogger, etc).
If you don't have all the information necessary to format one of the requests for stories by location, you can also look up locations by providing us any string of text, for which we'll return a list of locations matching that text. You can also filter these requests by specifying the type of location you're looking for—a ZIP code, a neighborhood, etc. Then you can use the location UUID provided in the metadata returned to look up stories for the location you want. This query would be very helpful for any application that has to accept user input to find a location. The results provide both exact and inexact matches. So if you search for Brooklyn, we'll return both Brooklyn, NY and Brooklyn, OH, and if you search for "san," you'll get location metadata for both San Francisco and San Antonio.
This is actually the first time we’re telling anyone about our API, so the only applications built on it so far are from our pilot partner CNN.
CNN has a module on their homepage, US section page, weather page, and personal profile pages that allows users to enter any US city or ZIP code and see Outside.in headlines for that region.
CNN's iPhone app has a similar feature that detects the user's location via GPS and provides Outside.in headlines from the nearest US city.
Personally I see our content as being an obvious supplement to any listings page that has a geographic location, such as business, real estate, or event listings, and could add interest to any mobile app.
You can get started at developers.outside.in. When you register for an API key, you'll be approved immediately.
If you have any questions, you can @ our corporate or API specific twitter handles, and I've also included contact info for me and for Brian, who's our lead developer on the API.