The vision behind this site is the idea that folks are interested in what is happening close to home (or wherever you happen to be). I know I am. The problem is that there is not a good way to find out what has happened close to home without doing a lot of digging in a lot of places, Newspaper sites, local community weeklys, TV sites etc.

The core idea that I am trying to develop and perpetuate is that searching news from many sources based on where the stories happened is of high value to consumers and publishers.

Eventually - hopefully not too far in the future you'd be able to slice and dice the data in several ways, select sources, contributors, date ranges etc.

You and others can then begin to build a picture of what is happening close to you.

To this end I have started the development of 5 core components and have a working prototype:

1. A front end to see the data using Google Maps.
2. A Client (Replaced by Spider and RSS crawler) that allowed you to submit locations you find in articles.
3. A spider that crawls sites that don't have RSS feeds looking for addresses.
4. An RSS crawler that looks consumes RSS feeds and crawls content of URLs looking for addresses
5. A SQL server Integration Services Package that does the geocoding, de-duplication  and outputs the XML used by the front end web site.

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