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.

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.

Alabama holds my roots in its dark red clay and kudzu-lined backroads, in the highways between Mobile and Tuscaloosa where I traveled to see my brother in college and in its kitchens where the women in my family told stories as they shelled peas, deveined shrimp and peeled sweet potatoes.

The connections users make with one another in social media are typically based on proximity, either social or physical because users are no longer residing in online spaces and then moving offline but rather moving between the two in a myriad of ways, most significantly creating web presences online for their geophysical location as a way to further construct and represent their collective identities.

Hyperlocal content does not necessarily mean focusing on smaller areas and excluding metropolitan areas like New York or Dallas. As a matter of fact, many sites I discuss throughout this webtext have the bulk of their content geared toward major cities rather than small towns. Recommendation site yelp asks users to share their local knowledge of businesses and organizations ranging from restaurants to churches.