I never understood homesickness as a kid or young adult because I loved traveling to my grandparents’, to friends’ houses and with my father on various trips to the country. I did not mind being away from home, perhaps because I moved from one geographic place to another frequently throughout my childhood. So home was never one location for me and thus the concept of missing one particular place, foreign.

As a metaphor, neighborhood evokes community, familiarity, shared space and often an assumption of shared values. Due to how easily and quickly groups emerge and dissolve via the Internet and our increasingly mobile society, we have made the concept of neighborhood into an icon, a holder of shared values. In doing so, a sense of nostalgia regarding neighborhoods emerges as we yearn for a place to connect with those who have something in common with us. Place easily becomes the focus of this yearning.

With today’s digital possibilities, society is not limited to geographic proximity for social connection or participation. In lieu of proximity, we rely on technology to help us construct our collective identities by trying to recreate connections to geophysical locations. Social media sites work as an “unbounded community,” in which my geographic location is only one way to connect me to other social media users.

The digital neighborhood, in the case of place bloggers, begins within a literal neighborhood and moves outward. And like many digital neighborhoods, place bloggers often focus on what journalists call hyperlocal content

According to its co-creator Steven B. Johnson outside.in is “an attempt to collectively build the geographic Web, neighborhood by neighborhood.” Johnson explains that the purpose of outside.in is to unite the various voices emerging from hyperlocal bloggers, review sites, city government sites and traditional media and ground the information geographically.

When focusing on hyperlocal content, the relevance of the information becomes paramount in order to avoid what Steven Johnson calls the “pothole paradox.” The idea is that the pothole in front of your home or apartment is a big deal to you, but your friends a few blocks over couldn’t care less.

I’m in Panama City Beach visiting my parents. Today Dad I went exploring around town, looking for the tackier kitschier parts of PCB, which is actually harder than you might think given today’s high rise condos and corporatized environment of the beach today. However, if you go into Panama City proper, otherwise known as “across the bridge,” the pink flamingos and the kitsch is alive and well.