Introducing Placenotes

If you live even a little of your life online, it's probably scattered across a lot of different sites -- photos on Flickr, friends on Facebook, one-liners on Twitter, and on and on.

Unfortunately, there's no simple way to collect all the bits you produce related to the place you live -- or share them with other people who live in that place.

For my Facebook and Twitter friends in other places, posts about Martha Coakley and the Central Sq Florist are nothing but noise. On the other hand, my friends who live in the Boston area may find this stuff interesting, and I want them to see it.

So today we're launching a solution to that problem -- Placenotes.

9Neighbors Placenotes are a drop-dead simple way to put all your local content in one place, and share it with friends and folks in your community.

Take a look at mine, and you'll see what I mean. On my page I'm aggregating:

> Photos I load into Flickr with the tag "9Neighbors"
> Posts to my Twitter account that include "#9n"
> Items on 9Neighbors that I vote for.
> Notes & links I post on 9Neighbors
> The feed for my blog (www.rickburnes.com)

You can set all this up on the 9Neighbors "Settings" page. Add your Twitter and Flickr username on the Profile Data tab, and any feeds you want on the "Feeds Settings" tab.

If you follow me, new items I produce will show up in your From Your Friends tab every time you log onto 9Neighbors.

We've created Placenotes to be a super-simple way to collect and share local content. Try them out, decide what you think, and let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

Following Your Friends on 9Neighbors

A few people have asked about the concept of "following" somebody on 9Neighbors.

Here's what it means: When you signup to "follow" somebody, you see all the things they find interesting on the site. That means that all the items they've voted for, links they've added and notes they've written will appear in the "Your News" tab at the top of your home page.

The goal is to give folks another way of filtering the site. The Popular Today tab provides a view of what's currently popular, the Most Recent tab lists the most recent items in the system, and Your News gives you a way to keep track of the items your friends find interesting.

If you're just getting started on 9Neighbors and looking for people to follow, you can find lots of people here.