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4:30PM Angus Kidman | TrueLocal’s new iPhone app does pretty much what you’d expect: finds local businesses near the location your iPhone’s GPS is transmitting, sorted by category and with Google Maps integration if you want to track them down on foot or by road.
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TrueLocal iPhone App Maps Local Businesses
4:30PM Angus Kidman | TrueLocal’s new iPhone app does pretty much what you’d expect: finds local businesses near the location your iPhone’s GPS is transmitting, sorted by category and with Google Maps integration if you want to track them down on foot or by road.
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SpotCrime Maps Local Illegal Happenings
7:05AM Kevin Purdy | US Only: Crime-mapping mashup SpotCrime pulls data from city police records and news sources and plots it in an easy-to-snoop fashion. Choose a city, a time frame, and the types of offences you want to see, and you can mouse over the pinned icons to see thumbnail descriptions, or click an item for a full read. The site claims that humans are working in the background to make sense of the data, and that incidents show up anywhere from 3-24 hours after they’re reported. A good tool for checking out a potential neighbourhood for moving or exploring, or just keeping up on what’s going down across town. SpotCrime [via TechCrunch] More »
BeerMenus.com Finds Beers by Bar
10:00PM Gina Trapani | Before you head out on the town tonight in New York City, find out where to get your thirsty hands on your favourite hard-to-find beer at BeerMenus.com. This menu search site just launched with over 150 beer menus, which include over 1200 beers. Browse by neighbourhood, brew, or bar to get a beer menu that lists price (by bottle and tap), alcohol content, and brewery, plus a map of the location, web site, hours, and phone number. BeerMenus.com is New York only (so far?) and isn’t yet comprehensive in its coverage there, but it’s off to a great start for beer-lovers in the Big Apple. More »
Map Your Local Freecycle Group
1:25AM Gina Trapani | In honour of Earth Day, Yahoo put together a “Free Is Good” web site promoting previously mentioned Freecycle, local mailing lists of folks who give away stuff they don’t need. Pop your city and state into the search engine and get a map back of nearby groups. The Freecycle groups themselves are Yahoo Groups, so you have to join the group using your Yahoo ID to see messages (and often a moderator has to approve the membership request.) From there you can offer stuff you’d throw away anyway to give to your neighbours for free, and take them up on their offers, too. More »
See Top Local Stories at Google News
12:30AM Kevin Purdy | Google News recently added a localisation feature to its main page, gathering stories not just from local newspapers and web outlets, but supposedly from sources across the internet: While we’re not the first news site to aggregate local news, we’re doing it a bit differently — we’re able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located. Nifty stuff, and a good way to keep up on what’s happening in your neck of the woods. All News is Local [Google News Blog via Google Blogoscoped] More »
