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As
you grow up, the world or what's "out there" seems to
grow and expand as you become more aware. As a young
baby, your house seems like that there is and there are
still areas that seem strange and alien to you. With
time, you start to learn about the street you live on
and the people around there. You slowly start to
explore the local neighborhood maybe with the help of a
new bicycle or skateboard as you get older. Eventually,
you're old enough to actually drive and then your idea
of local expands accordingly. You can drive to the
beach or mountains. You can go on road trips to other
cities, states, or even countries if you're so
inclined. That's just the beginning. There's a whole
world out there with ever expounding boundaries. This
begs the questions...what exactly is local? Let's dig a
little deeper and figure out how we view it with the
Zipper Local News app for iTunes and Android smart
phones.
The
definition of local was critical in our design of the
Zipper app. Too wide a net and it ceases to be local
while narrow a net, and it ceases to be useful. Where
exactly was that Goldilocks region of local in terms of
news and information that will be valuable and by
definition of region, topical to you. There in lies the
challenge. A great definition of local as it pertains
to valuable information. We started with the opposite
approach to narrow our range...what would not be useful
as a regional range and to a great extent, what is
already well-covered with other online and smart phone
sites and apps. Let's say I live in Fort Worth, Texas.
What's local? We'll go down the scale till we find a
nice starting point. Obviously, world and national news
is way to broad and there are plenty of venues available
for this information both in terms of traditional news
outlets which are online (think Reuters or AP) or recent
additions such as Twitter which have no geographic
boundary at all. What about State news? Probably still
too broad. Sticking with our Fort Worth example, news
from Houston or San Antonio doesn't really pertain to me
and if it's so big, I will catch it on my other
traditional news outlets. This probably still true for
regional news such as North Texas or even Panhandle
information. What about City? Is that a good fit for
the cap of our information source and coverage. Now
we're entering that gray area. On one hand, bigger news
from the other side of Ft Worth might be of interest but
a lot of smaller stories might as well be in Houston.
This is where we need to start at least. Can we refine
our definition of local even further and how would we do
that?
What
about zip codes. Zip codes are a pretty handy way to
filter for local information and the structure is
already existing but there are some issues. For one
thing, you may live right on the border of two zip
codes. This means that information right across the
street could be hidden from you. That's not going to
work . In the end, we decided to go with a straight
distance radius to determine local so we can avoid this
zip code issue. We're still playing with what radius
defines local but you can estimate between 30 and 60
miles. In future upgrades, we're looking at the ability
of the user to set what this radius of local will be.
Every locale's sense of locality is different. If
you're in a very densely populated area like downtown
New York, local may be a couple of blocks. If you're
way out in the corn fields of Indiana, local may stretch
for 100 miles. Your high school may draw from miles
around and that obviously is a good measure of the word
local.
At
the bottom end of our definition, we wanted to jump
beyond the restrictions of your social networks which
aren't locality driven but never the less, very
restrictive on your access to truly local news and
gossip. In this respect, there's no miminum cap for
local but one that involves everyone providing and
accessing information within the maximum cap of what
defines local mentioned above. Ultimately, local is a
moving target and indeed, we plan to move along side it
as the Zipper is refined based on our audience's view of
valuable local news and local gossip.
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