There seems to be a lot of discussions around the issue of whether hyperlocal sites should leverage aggregation techniques vs original content creation to engage local communities. I believe in a combination of both. However, aggregation techniques should be more semantic to extract implicit relationships between posts and to identify key concepts in aggregated content. This way hyperlocal news will be more topic oriented. At the same time, editorial content should extend automatic aggregations by adding precise tagging (geolocalization) and categorizations. Also, smart summaries of content that cannot be easily aggregated should enrich semi automatic hyperlocal sites to increase the breadth of coverage.
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