Building tools and services for the truly local content and advertising industry has its challenges. For one, it's an environment, thankfully, dominated by thousands of independent sites and businesses. For another, there's the damn word hyperlocal.

It's used to describe everything from fully automated aggregators to finely crafted mom and pop journalism.

That's confusing. It's confusing to the businesses and site owners, it's confusing to advertisers and it's confusing to the communities and audiences that have grown to love these offerings.

Seeking to bust through this haze, EveryBlock's Adrian Holovaty suggested way back in December 2008 that what his service was doing was not 'hyperlocal' but instead...

Microlocal.
This gives a much better sense of our focus. It's unambiguous in its level of detail: the 1400 block of S. Hill Street in Seattle is unequivocally "micro." Is a neighborhood micro? Yeah, kinda, depending on the size. An entire county, a borough, or city/suburb? No.

Hmmm. Living in Microsoft territory, 'micro' anything is a bit of a loaded term. But we're also not in the same business as EveryBlock. While both the Neighborlogs and EveryBlock services are focused on providing local information to local audiences, the system philosophies are completely different. EveryBlock is about systematically categorizing and organizing information. We provide some of that organization as a base but Neighborlogs is focused on creation of incremental local content. We do this by providing a free service to local news and information editors to create their own, independent sites presenting their content and providing relevant, local advertising opportunities to small businesses around the corner.

So, we're not microlocal. And since that hasn't caught on and everything under the sun is still hyperlocal, we're not that either. For now, until somebody comes up with a better buzzword, we're just 'local.' Maybe we should just say we're in the 'neighborhood blog' business. But that's another debate.