I just stopped in at Outside.in, that’s right, outside dot in, Steven Berlin Johnson’s national directory of neighborhood blogging by zipcode and it looks cooler than ever. It says it is currently tracking 3,243 neighborhoods.

On February 27th they rolled out a whole bunch of new features and it’s pretty impressive and a big boost for neighborhood blogging.

“As you can see, we’ve rolled out a ton of new features this morning, along with a significant streamlining of the design. We’re going to walk through some of the changes on the blog in the next day or so, but for now the most important thing to understand are the basic new categories we’ve added that now form the underlying architecture of the site: Neighbors, Places, Stories, and Comments. We’ve only scratched the surface of what we can do with these different variables, but we think you’ll see why they’re going to be a lot of fun to explore.”