A Startup A Day

Last Silverlight idea for a while, I promise. 

So, raise your hand if you actually watch the local news.  Yeah, that’s what I thought.  Between blogs and podcasts and Google News Microsoft Windows Live Local News System 2007 Professional Edition and the good ol’ Seattle PI, I don’t need to watch the news anymore.  However, the nice thing about TV news is that it sets a quality bar – you only have 30 minutes, so you better pack it full of only the most important local news stories.  There’s good content there, how can it be packaged up better for my consumption?

Here’s one way to do it.  Take the nightly news, chop it up into individual stories, and geo-code each clip.  Then display each story on a map so users can view the top news stories that have taken place in your neighborhood over the past day, week or even the past month.  Another option would be to sign up for an RSS feed or daily Email showing all the stories that took place within 10 miles of their address.

Along with geo-coding, you could tag each story with additional info, such as crime, community event, sports, etc..  You could then get an interesting aggregation of data, i.e. show me a map highlighting the location of all crimes that have taken place over the past month that are serious enough to land on the evening news.  This could give an interesting local perspective on a city that you are not familiar with, to ensure that you don’t book accidentally book a hotel in a sketchy part of town.

Any thoughts on this one?  Could this be done with newspaper articles as well?  Got a new contest coming soon, stay tuned…