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There WAS a time when Indianapolis had the disparaging nickname of "Indiana-No-place" but gladly those days are long gone! Nevertheless, if Indianapolis is to continue to prosper, it will have to continue to brand itself in a positive light and a prime way to do that is via social media.
For some time, I have been concerned that Indianapolis is "missing the boat" (yes, I KNOW that we are landlocked :-) in the "place" blogosphere. By this, I mean the use of placeblogging to tell the story of the city that I am proud to call my home.
About a year and a half ago, I approached a prominent Indianapolis community leader to express my concern. At that time, I was already a fan of what I consider the leading service for supporting placebloggers: outside.in which I had been using. I was concerned because there was very little Indianapolis-related activity on outside.in at that time and even now, that situation has not improved considerably.
Outside.in pulls in Indianapolis-related content from various sources, but Indianapolis is STILL NOT among the cities featured on the service (see the toolbar for "Change City" on the service). I suspect that's because there are few Indianapolis blogs that have been submitted to outside.in.
It's easy to submit YOUR blog to outside.in and when you do, outside.in will scan your posts and try to automatically geotag them by detecting names of cities, neighborhoods, places, etc. in your posts. It's very COOL! Even if outside.in doesn't do it correctly or automatically, the GeoToolkit has a tool that makes it very easy to add location metadata to your posts. Then, check out http://outside.in/radar to watch for your posts to appear. To make your blog even better, be sure to put a StoryMap on your blog, too.
I encourage YOU to join me on outside.in to make Indianapolis into THE PLACE in the placeblogosphere as part of our effort to brand Indianapolis as the social media "Crossroads of America"
Comments
Great thoughts Dr. Ho. I remember you talked about this quite awhile back and I never followed up with it. I'll look into it now. As I've begun writing about Indianapolis for the ICVA on their blog site. Sounds like taking advantage of Outside.in will help in our efforts to continue to promote the city.
Not sure I like outside.in's TOS. Perpetual use and pretty much ownership of any content that comes from blogs and RSS feeds I link into my account?
When I noticed Indianapolis was not listed among the International cities participating in the twestival, I had the same feeling, Dr. Ho, and that's why I spearheaded the twestival event... to get us on the social media map.
There is a bit of a "let's not brag about our state or ourselves" mentality among Hoosiers. My sis lives in SanDiego and she purposely will not brag about Indiana because she doesn't want the outside world to learn how groovy we can be, then flock here and ruin it for everybody.
Update 6/18/2009: I see that Indianapolis is now listed on the list of cities at www.outside.in, so it looks like your efforts paid off. Thanks!
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