Boosting the Signal
My friend and co-conspirator, Ryan Williams, has been putting together a little something he calls Local Signal for some time now. Even in its infancy, I thought Ryan was on to something, but after getting a few reviews and mentions, I’m sure of it.
There have been a number of comparisons with Goboz, even on the PDX Web Innovators discussion boards, but there’s something much simpler and more elegant about Local Signal that beats a crazy busy site like Goboz. (It’s got a cooler name, too, in my opinion, and Ryan even got help picking it out.)
If I’m traveling to a new city or just curious about what’s happening around town, I just want to peruse the news — serendipity is more useful than specific categorization and top 10 lists, as Goboz does. It’s like reading the paper … articles of interest can catch my eye that I might not otherwise have known to look for. Local Signal accomplishes that. And while I do use a feed reader (my old reliable is Bloglines), I don’t necessarily want to gather even more feeds in my feed reader than I already have just to keep up with local events and news.
I’m really hoping that Ryan sees some activity on Local Signal. With about 50 U.S. cities and counting, it’s already something I use as a regular tool. If you’ve got ideas for Local Signal, or just want to wish him well, stop by Ryan’s blog and give him feedback. You can read more about his “official” preview release on his blog as well.
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There’s some good momentum this week with the site being added to ProgrammableWeb’s mashup directory. Once we get the home page in a little better shape and round out the content on a few more cities, the marketing progression will continue upward through the ranks. One nice thing about Local Signal is marketing by referrer, as bloggers and sites get traffic from LocalSignal, hopefully they’ll find it interesting/helpful and give us a mention (at least one has already). Help yourself by helping us is my motto
There are so many ways to read the news these days with feed readers, social news sites, meme trakcers, single page aggregators, and of course plain ol’ edited news. Hopefully we can fill a good niche.
noticed that Local Signal links to Goboz sometimes….