Rediff.com has launched LocalNews, a local news service built on top of its RealTime News Search, which indicates that the company is increasingly going hyperlocal. Rediff LocalNews essentially takes news from partners from its RealTime News search, and showcases it in on a map, organized by location. The discovery of news is through search and the map: users can zoom into specific locations on the map, and Rediff has done well to try and ensure that the interface isn't too cluttered, since information from towns can overlap easily and appear cluttered. For example, it's only on zooming thrice that I was able to see the news for the town of Patnagarh. Still, we do think that Rediff can do a few things to improve the interface: perhaps, instead of the news appearing overlapping the map itself, there can be a column on the left which displays the news updates, alongwith recommending news for nearby towns; when you click on a new location, the news gets updated. This is cleaner and also allows Rediff to introduce monetization into the news feed - through its local deals initiative - Rediff Deal Ho Jaye. What's worth noting here is that news isn't necessarily categorized by city or the town in which the news has originated, but (it appears to us) by the fact that the town or city has been mentioned in the news story: For example, a news story that has been published in Delhi, but is about the Bokaro Steel…
