A neighborhood blogger's business is built on top of unique local content and attention. That's the basic equation. Place-based aggregators, then, are double-edged swords. They bring a 'hood blog distribution and attention but they can and do damage the perceived uniqueness of the content. There are few things more frustrating on this planet for a placeblogger than finding Outside.in's version of your post ranking higher in search results than the actual post. Just writing that out makes me get hot under the collar.

To date, Outside.in has been the only big player focusing on "place" in the aggregator space. But starting in August, Seattle also got its first exposure to EveryBlock. The services can be described similarly but have quite a different take on things. Outside.in is focused almost exclusively on created content whereas EveryBlock gives equal emphasis to semi-automated sources like the latest restaurant inspection reports or land use filings. Because of this, EveryBlock is much more useful to me as a quick and easy way to keep track of this kind of informaton. While I still check my feeds from Outside.in a few times a day looking for interesting bits to share on my Capitolhillseattle.com blog, EveryBlock is more often a source I use in my posts.

But news gathering is not my primary concern with these aggregators. I want eyeballs! After giving EveryBlock a few months to settle in here in the Pacific Northwest, I was curious to see how well these double-edged swords were working the attention side of the blade. Below, you'll see two fever lines representing weekly raw click-thrus from the two sites to our Neighborlogs beta sites in Seattle:

I was surprised to see both how much EveryBlock is scuffling along and that Outside.in is growing. Comparing the past four weeks vs. the four previous to that, OI has sent about 32% more clicks to the Seattle Neighborlogs sites while EveryBlock was up only 1%. Now, confounding factors definitely should be included in this. For one, we've added a few beta sites in the last four weeks so the 32% is boosted a bit by that (but not much because the new sites are so, well, new!) Also, EveryBlock is not in as many markets as OI (though it's fully deployed here). And it's possible that outside.in has made changes in its recipe that somehow emphasize sites like the ones people build using Neighborlogs. 

I also looked at the quality of visitors sent by the two systems to see whether I was getting flooded by low-engagement, drive-by visits from the sites.

EveryBlock's visitors stuck around longer and were a bit more engaged but a smaller percentage of them were new eyeballs.  Overall, however, quality from both sites was good. Now, if they can just come up with some solid ways to help 'hood bloggers further monetize those eyeballs.