ResearchBuzz

It seems like the Internet is really great at organizing things on the macro level (countries and states) and less so at the microlevel (streets and neighborhoods.) It might just be axiomatic that the smaller the group, the less public the communications. At any rate there is a site available that’s tracking over 3000 neighborhoods in over 50 cities. Outside.in’s available at http://outside.in/ .

From the front page you can do a city or zip code search, as well as browse featured neighborhoods and cities. I did a search for my old favorite, 90210. What I got was a list of blog entries focused on the Los Angeles area, as well as a list of top tags, and a blogroll (there was only one blog on the blogroll, but there were several blogs represented on the blog entries list, and you can suggest blog entries or entire blogs for particular areas.) That particular zip code had 43 entries; in comparison 10016, which is New York, had 40 items. Each zip code has its own RSS feed so you can keep up in your feed reader.

In addition to the column of blog posts there’s also a column for events; even for the New York City region, though, this list was woefully thin. The site does encourage visitors to submit their site and blog posts for inclusion, though.

This is not something I often say but I think this site would be well-served by mashing up a bit. If one took event listings from other sites, job listings from places like Monster, and maybe even entries from Craigslist, this resource would be fleshed out a lot and would still have the unique content afforded by blog posts sorted by geographical area. Would there be some way to filter that in? (Ooo ooo! And Topix.) There’s already a good number of areas here, and I like the fact that they are so vigorously encouraging submissions, but there’s a lot of fleshing out to be done. Worth a look if they’re covering your city.

If you not only want to buy an airline ticket but try to figure out when that ticket might be cheaper or more expensive, check out the new beta of Farecast, available at Farecast.com. The beta is so limited that this is mostly a technology showcase, but it’s an interesting technology showcase.

The limitations: outbound markets are limited to Seattle and Boston. Only roundtrip airfares are available. Sometimes lowest airfares are missed and there are some browser incompatibility issues. You can get a complete listing of the beta limitations here; note these limitations are all being worked on.

The front page has a query box for a trip leaving Boston/Seattle and going several places around the US, you also specify date and the number of people on the trip (a flexible search allows you to compare fares over a 30-day period.) I created a flight from Boston to Buffalo, leaving 7/14 and coming back 7/20.

Farecast thought about it for a minute and came back with a chart predicting that the lowest fare would rise an average of $36 over the next 7 days. Farecast was 78% confident of this prediction. There was also a chart available showing the average ticket prices for this fare over the last couple of months. (Run your mouse over the points of the chart to get prices and dates for those prices.)

Beneath that is a pretty standard fare listing showing low prices, airline, times of departure, etc. A filter system on the left allows you to narrow down the results several different ways — time of departure, airlines, number of stops, price range, etc. (There’s a grid listing tab at the top of the search results page if you’d rather look at the results that way.) Click on the name of the airline/fare provider to go straight to their site.

It’s interesting; I know airfares go up and down, but every single scenario I looked at the fares were going up. Sometimes they were only going up a little bit, but they were going up. You can get some overview of how Farecast is doing its predictions at http://www.farecast.com/about/ourTechnology.jsp.

Due to the extreme limitations of the beta, this isn’t really useful for ticket shopping, but the prediction technology is interesting. It would be useful to either have a third-party watching the success of their predictions over time, or perhaps a place on their site that keeps tabs on their own “track record.”

This has been in my queue for a while now, glad I’m finally getting a chance to write about it. TurnHere is a new site that provides information about places in the US and around the world via short films (hundreds of short films.) Check them out at http://www.turnhere.com.

The masthead mentions New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, but there’s a a locations page that mentions all the different cities for which films are available, from Albuquerque to Woodstock, Vermont.

Hey, there’s Reykjavik, Iceland! I go to that page and there’s one film, a three-and-a-half-minute film from Steve Janas. You can view the film on the site, or download it.

Some locations have more than one film. Chicago’s page had eight films covering several aspects of the city including Chicago in general, the Gold Coast, and a very interesting film about Wrigleyville and lots of the characters at a Cubs game. The films are all different; some of them have first-person leading/narration, some of them are just a series of interviews, shots, and music. To the left of the films you’ll notice that there are pointers to other activities in the city, surrounding areas, etc. Most of the films seemed to be between two-and-a-half and four minutes long.

If you look at some of the larger cities — the New York page is an example — you’ll see that some films are marked “Sponsored”. TurnHere has a “Sponsored Film Program” that allows businesses to create films that are featured on TurnHere and which businesses can promote on other sites. I checked out the one for Tom’s Diner in Brooklyn. It was very short (just less than a minute) and while it was focused on Tom’s Diner it didn’t feel blatantly “addy”.

It is interesting how much of a different sense of a place you can get from a brief film, and the wide variety of places covered on the site made wandering through the various locations fun. Worth an explore.