The geography of news and Topics.net

Rich Skrenta and The geography of news and how physical location matters - Topics.net is an innovative service aggregating news sources from 50k+ sources and blogs. Categorizing news down to the zipcode. Launched in 04, 10m unique monthly visitors, 332,500 local news pages. The software scans a story and figures out what I’ts about and where its about. Using their own algorithms The Approach… geographic entity recognition, disambiguation, supporting evidence threshold – this enables identification of content that is about a specific area, not just merely mentioning a geographic entity. Maps are provide to show comment activity - this as a heatmap and GeoRSS feeds are also available. As an example see news items about San Jose - http://www.topix.net/san-jose. Check out topix news at www.topix.net