Thing #43

Somehow or another the month of December zipped by and I never made time to complete Thing #43. I took a look at Patch and EveryBlock but I couldn't get very excited about them since they did not cover any locations in Nebraska. Next I moved on to Outside.in.

Outside.in really confused me at first. I’m not exactly sure how I did it but I ended on a page labeled: Nebraska Local News - Fort Wayne Fort Wayne Metro Indianan USA. The “Latest Headlines” on the page just added to my confusion. There were 10 stories listed, out of those 6 were clearly stories in the state of NE, 2 from IN, and 2 football related stories that I’m not sure where they belonged. It looks like Outside.in is also confused. At this point my curiosity got the best of me so I had to go look at a map of Fort Wayne and see that there is an area of town labeled Nebraska. There is: http://goo.gl/maps/cEaX

I tried to get back on track and this time used the link that Emily provided that took me to the list of neighborhoods in NE. I thought I’d start off looking at the info for the small town in NE where I grew up. Here again I was disappointed with the headlines. Out of the 6 headlines 3 of them were correct although they were all from August. The other 3 were for stories out of state with no connection to my home town. My experience did not improve when I tried some of the “Local Places” links on the left. Every option I tired was blank.

Next I moved on to Lincoln. The “Latest Headlines” were much better. I was also able to find information under the Local Places although I was disappointed there was no library news. I was even able to find information about the area in Lincoln where I live.

The other site I checked out was Placeblogger. I didn't spend much time on it simply because there wasn't much information that was update to see. The most recent item under “The latest from Lincoln” was dated November 23, 2010 from the Lincolnite blog. There’s obviously some problem between the site and blog because I know that blog has been active recently.

As you can tell my overall experience with these sites wasn't that great. I’m not sure if the communities in Nebraska are just too small for these type of sites to be useful or if none of these sites have really embraced Nebraska and tired to improve the listings for the state.