That is very cool indeed. Cool enough to pay for? That’s the $60,000 question. *grin*

Good stuff, Chris–I’m amazed that your site is a one-man band, and it’s a bold move to build first and fund later. Thanks for your comments, as well.

Lissa: Regarding your Knight idea, being a native West Virginian, with similar geography and lack of news coverage issues, I think you might have something there (even if I’m not the biggest Drupal fan in the world … to each their own).

On to a couple of your comments:

After running FollowIndy for nearly 10 months now on my own dime, I can definitely see some of the issues you bring up. Until very recently, I haven’t had a lot of server resources available to expand out to many non-traditional news sources, but as I sit and watch the Colts game, I’m starting to work on that now.

One other thing I’m keenly interested in trying is using the tagging mechanism not necessarily as a simple way to navigate around FollowIndy itself, but as a way to follow threads of news in the community through a related stories API.

Write a blog post, get a block in your sidebar with links to related, local content. Publish a news article, and get the same.

As for revenue models, I want to create something sustainable here, which to me means covering the server costs and maybe earning enough money for an employee or two. I have some ideas, but some of that is dependent on how the grant process turns out.

Most of the ideas are tied to the earlier-mentioned related stories API, however. Revenue could either be generated from a commercial licensing or membership fee, or (and this idea just occurred to me this evening) a kind of AdSense for content, where the system pays you for sending traffic out of your site and charges the publisher for links coming in, all on a bid basis (again, a new thought, still noodling with it).

Thanks very much for the feedback!

Speaking of hamsters. We’ve got a great geographically-based aggregator in Boston: Adam Gaffin, the guy behind Universal Hub. He highlights the best stuff from local blogs and tweets, opines on Globe/Herald/community-news coverage, maps crime, publishes the groans of frustrated T riders (and Sox fans!) in real time, follows the courts, and sometimes breaks news. It’s an aggregator with a fair amount of content, but it has a voice and a personality of its own–Adam’s sort of a metro columnist who writes 10-15 times a day.

I’m involved in a project to get something similar off the ground in a much more rural area, the Catskills in upstate New York. It’s called the Watershed Post. We’re very lucky to have Adam on board as our web developer, and we’re hoping (but not waiting!) for a little Knight News Challenge love as well. Slings and arrows most welcome:

http://generalapp.newschallenge.org/SNC/ViewItem.aspx?pguid=6aee8166-fb7c-4a2e-8581-fa6f6ff036dd&itemguid=c9e49e07-c18c-4597-a41b-fd7b5394e760