Some interesting news about the outreach mission. From time to time, Asymptotia posts get picked up by some of the local blogs of note, such as LA Observed, and that’s just great, since many things I talk about here are right at the intersection of local interest and the arts and sciences, especially education (such as talking in a local school), events such as the Categorically Not! ones at Santa Monica Airport, and issues such as the environment, in addition to the pure fun stuff, and the tasty stuff. For example, Kevin Roderick at LA Observed was kind enough to mention the posts about the Griffith Observatory (the new relaunch, and the controversy about the use of actors in the planetarium show), judging at the Science Fair at the California Science Center, as well as the post on the open day at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the post about cycling in the city (perhaps in combination with public transportation, as an alternative to blindly using your car/SUV for most journeys).
Well, I was pleased to get an email a few days ago telling me that Outside.In have added added Asymptotia to their list of LA neighbourhood blogs, and the posts will be scanned for local references, and then added to a location map of all blogs posts. So what happens is that you can look at a neighbourhood in Outside.In (I tailored the previous link to 90089, the zip that USC is in, for example) and see marks on a map where blog posts have pointed to, or lists of posts that pertain to a particular zip code or neighbourhood. You can then follow those marks back to the blog posts! It’s very cool indeed. This will work for your neighbourhood too, where ever you are (in the USA) – just put in your zip code.
Each blog in the system also has their own page, and the one for Asymptotia is here. You should go to it to experiment with the clickability, but I also took a screen shot (since I can’t see how to live-embed the map), and so this is it earlier:
So far it seems a bit inconsistent with picking things up and I don’t know why – it might well be my own misunderstanding of how it works (for example the posts I did on Thursday had lots of local places mentioned but have not shown up – let’s see if this one does) but it is already really interesting, particularly when you look at who else has been recently blogging about the very same spot (the black marks vs your orange marks) that you have.
It will be really interesting to see where this goes as a tool/resource.
-cvj
