Idea Lab

A small local website from Brooklyn has partnered with NBC to build neighborhood pages for a handful of NBC markets. I haven't followed Outside.in for more than stoop sales (which is New Yorkerese for garage sales or yard sales since most New Yorkers have neither yards nor garages), but it looks like they've taken up EveryBlock's approach to local news aggregation as well, though they want posts explicitly geo-tagged for their maps.

Speaking of EveryBlock, they recently announced that they're working with the New York Times to track Times reporting on political districts. Presumably they'll be taking advantage of the Times' new API -- now if only they could tell the rest of the media how to flag our stories as discussing a particular district. As the local election season gets rolling, Gotham Gazette will be covering many underreported races along side the ones everyone is talking about, and we'll be aggregating coverage of every race as it appears in other papers and news outlets around the city.

And, speaking of news outlets, local NPR station WNYC has launched a very cool crowdsourcing project tracking Uncommon Economic Indicators to mixed results so far (there's a tweet up right now about the rising cost of heroin) but it should be interesting to see what listeners come up with.