Outside.in is (1) the first clever use of a TLD that I've ever liked and (2) author Steven Berlin Johnson's latest project. It's a geo-located news aggregator, blog, and coffee shop rolled into one. Type in your zip code or neighborhood name and it constructs an online world of the things going on in your immediate space. One thing I particularly like is that, unlike with many social tools, content here isn't treated like it has an expiration date. For example, there may well be a great restaurant or music venue that stays great from one year to the next. You'll find that here. Sprinkled in there are still of course the timely bits -- gossip, police reports, event notices.

But the neatest part is a Google map application that allow you to pull back and back and back from your neighborhood to the larger environs. That's particulary useful in a place like New York City, where there's a lot of relevent information in my neighborhood but a whole lot more just outside of it.

It's Johnson's "long zoom" at work. If you haven't read his recent New York Times article, Johnson thinks that the long zoom is the defining way our era sees life. The idea is this. Renaissance art had a way of looking at things from a fixed perspective. The 80's is defined by the MTV quick-cut style. What makes us unique is that nowadays we "mov(e) conceptually from the scale of DNA to the scale of personality all the way up to social movements and politics --- and back again."