Outside.in has taken another huge step down the path of location based innovation, bringing us one step closer to better connecting content with geo-context; introducing the GeoToolkit.  Launched yesterday, this beta program aims at helping content authors better pinpoint the geographic relevance of their work through a simple online toolset. The core of the GeoToolkit service takes submitted blog feeds and automatically scans them for information related to place.  It then gives the author a set of tools to better refine the levels of associated places, which includes adding place/neighborhood information, viewing stats of content locations, and the ultra-intuitive map views of where they are writing about . From their announcement:

“outside.in’s GeoToolkit New , the first service to help web publishers like you analyze and promote your local content. We’ve been using these tools here at outside.in for a while and decided it was time to share with our neighbors.”

More work you say? maybe…. but to understand the potential value of associating content with place, you’ve got to check their recent release of RADAR.  RADAR is an example of filtering information related to multiple levels of place, truly taking advantage of hyperlocal content all the way down beyond the neighborhood level.

Strangely enough,  when the toolkit processed my blog feed it skipped a number of posts that had numerous place names, and chose instead to identify others that had the same geographic descriptors for no apparent reason. It is a beta release afterall, but I hope this process gets better at identifying correct spatial context.

Digging deaper, the 5 ways they are processing place from a feed includes:

1. You can link to a Place Page outside.in place page
2. Include a GoogleMaps location in your content ( http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=NYC&ie=UTF8&ll=40.714509,-74.00713&spn=0.001441,0.002079&z=19 )
3. Add Zipcode as a tag or category: 10024
4. Add a Where Tag to the copy: [where: Manhattan, NY]
5. GeoRSS

These guys are doing some really smart stuff in the LBS space, look for them to release some compelling version of hyperlocal content delivery on the iPhone very soon.