Local news is hot, and one very interesting Dutch start-up in that field is MappedUp. On this site they track a large number of RSS news sources and display the latest items on a world map, geographically and in real-time! Last week they went into public Beta and you can now register to further personalize the site. When you have an account you can specify specific RSS feeds and set tags (subjects) for the info you want to see on your MappedUp.
Next to the fact that the site looks way cool (AJAX), I also think that visualisation is very important. …read more

Platial has a new service called Today Nearby, it is a very (very!) nice mashup of feeds from Reuters, Flickr, YouTube and others. The information from these feeds is put on a map and you can subscribe to this feed with KML and RSS. It’s great to see a local cityname when you arrive on the page! Nice;) Type in any cityname and you should see the latest info about that region… Platial also have their own blog which states:
This is our first stab at a tool that works with the growing wealth of geo-referenced information and provides a real-time …read more

The Geonames “RSS to GeoRSS Converter” reads the entries of an RSS feed and searches the Geonames Database to find a location for the entry text. If a relevant location is found, its latitude and longitude are added to the RSS feed using the GeoRSS encoding (via rss-specifications.com).
It works pretty good, check out this example of the Reuters newsfeed. The lat and long parameters are added to each item, sweet!

Zixxo provides a web-based coupon creation, management and syndication network that enables businesses to reward favorable behavior by local consumers.
They have launched a great new service; local coupons via RSS. Techcrunch calls it a very big market (see stats). Last year, 323 billion coupons were distributed in the U.S., and of those 4.5 billion were actually used. With Zixxo users can find coupons via a search or browse on the site, or receive email or RSS alerts for the location and/or coupon categories of their choice. Sounds good!