I was looking over the tech news wires today when I came across what seems to be a great new release - MetaCarta Local Alerts Service for Publishers.  It's a service that "notifies users when there is new content that mentions the places they care about most."

This could be a powerful tool for online community development - as it can be used to inform people about news stories, classified ads, community events, restaurant reviews and even social media, related to their favorite city, town, or neighborhood.

Although it appears that the service is being targeted primarily for the delivery of advertising in order to increase local revenue, I can see how this application, when used properly, could transform the delivery of media as well.

Think about it - this type of feature could be used to deliver notices for everything from movie releases, local news stories, or alerts for political activists.  And, if cross-platform delivery is the goal (i.e. mobile devices), I believe it'll really take off.

From their press release, here's an overview of features:

--Personalized Geo-Targeted Content Delivery – Site visitors can receive personalized content that discusses the places and locations they designate as important.
--Automatic Geographic Data Extraction – Local Alerts identifies the places mentioned in unstructured content, in real time, making it easy to deliver it to specific users.
--Registration-based service – Local alerts is a registration-based service that enables a one-to-one relationship with users.
--Flexible Implementation – The solution comes with a registration based system or easily integrates to existing registration and email systems.
--Outsourced Solution – Software-as-a-service (SaaS) model offers rapid implementation and on-demand scalability.

It'll be interesting to see what developers will do with this.  Might be something that would fit in with the Knight News Challenge, which is giving away development cash of about $5 million for "innovative new media projects that serve the needs of local communities."

Seems to me that News Challenge and MetaCarte's Local Alerts go hand in hand.