Local Circle is an easy-to-deploy system for automatic syndication of related content among local news sites and bloggers.
While making great, informative websites has gotten easier, driving traffic to them remains very difficult. We believe that if local news and blogging sites linked to each other more often, they would provide a better experience to their readers, and together build a more engaged audience—i.e., a rising tide would “lift all boats.”
Local Circle is a distributed peer-to-peer syndication system for serving related news links from the syndicate partners on a member’s site. The system is implemented quite simply as a WordPress plugin. Once downloaded, participating news sites need only enter the urls of their syndication partners. The system then automatically identifies related stories from those partners, and serves links to those stories next to the original story. No centralized repository or additional coordination is required.
Student team
Ali Hashmi, Journalism
Jason Lee, Computer Science
Mahmood Quaderi, Computer Science
Faculty Advisors
Larry Birnbaum
Rich Gordon
Kris Hammond