My (patient and gracious) fellow blogger Ian Lind did a post today that pointed to Hawaiirama (which explained the slight traffic surge today -- thanks Ian) and also pointed me to a new hyperlocal news service called Outside.in. I checked out the Honolulu flavor after finding the link on Ian's blog. At first, I thought -- huh, this is cool! It was like a more wide-open version of Topix.net, which is an awesome source for local news. Outside.in includes content from blogs and other online news sites that Topix may miss. Because its user generated, Outside.in is far from comprehensive -- the silicon troops at Topix still beats it pretty badly on that count. Then I started to see the cracks in the facade.

A lot of the posts were actually old restaurant coverage that were essentially puff pieces. The postings seemed somewhat random. The news was local but hardly hyper-local, a hallowed zone that local dailies have never been able to enter and Outside.in is also targeting (no surprise, as the hyper-local news market is the only part of the print newspaper business that continues to thrive). Could Outside.in Honolulu become a true font of citizen journalism, a great place to find little league profiles alongside neighborhood crime reports? And, by extension, a great place for visitors to access truly local events and enjoy a more authentic (trite cliche alert!) vacation experience in Hawaii? Perhaps. It's already a decent place to get a mixed flavor of Hawaii from random news sources, a far less homogenized view of the islands than is offered by any single site. I'll def keep reading and hope you will, too. Meanwhile, hey Outside.in/Honolulu. Throw a few links my way, too, cuz!

—Alex, 04/09/07