It seems like the Internet is really great at organizing things on the macro level (countries and states) and less so at the microlevel (streets and neighborhoods.) It might just be axiomatic that the smaller the group, the less public the communications. At any rate there is a site available that’s tracking over 3000 neighborhoods in over 50 cities. Outside.in’s available at http://outside.in/ .

From the front page you can do a city or zip code search, as well as browse featured neighborhoods and cities. I did a search for my old favorite, 90210. What I got was a list of blog entries focused on the Los Angeles area, as well as a list of top tags, and a blogroll (there was only one blog on the blogroll, but there were several blogs represented on the blog entries list, and you can suggest blog entries or entire blogs for particular areas.) That particular zip code had 43 entries; in comparison 10016, which is New York, had 40 items. Each zip code has its own RSS feed so you can keep up in your feed reader.

In addition to the column of blog posts there’s also a column for events; even for the New York City region, though, this list was woefully thin. The site does encourage visitors to submit their site and blog posts for inclusion, though.

This is not something I often say but I think this site would be well-served by mashing up a bit. If one took event listings from other sites, job listings from places like Monster, and maybe even entries from Craigslist, this resource would be fleshed out a lot and would still have the unique content afforded by blog posts sorted by geographical area. Would there be some way to filter that in? (Ooo ooo! And Topix.) There’s already a good number of areas here, and I like the fact that they are so vigorously encouraging submissions, but there’s a lot of fleshing out to be done. Worth a look if they’re covering your city.