Outside.in will change your life. Here’s the blurb on their home page:

Discover the conversations that
are going on in your neighborhood—whether that’s where you live,
where you work, or where you want to be.

See what locals are saying
right now, and share your own wisdom with your friends and neighbor.

Developed by Park Sloper, Steven Berlin Johnson, author of "Everything Bad is Good for You" and "The Ghost Map," outside.in is designed to be a bridge between blog-space and real-world space, In a single glance, you can see all the blog posts that are  happening around
you. Needless to say, this is very useful for me. But it’s also a great resource for people who are very interested in very local Brooklyn news. Here’s what outside.in has to say about itself:

"Philosophically, this site is all about letting locals
share their knowledge in ways that make sense to them, and so we’ve
tried to make the tools here simple ones that will encourage many
different ways of using the site. But here are a few scenarios we
imagine…

Every day, the web collects new essential information about your
local community: the open house around the corner; a restaurant review
in the local paper; a rant from a parent about a declining public
school; a concert that’s just been announced; a police report on a
recent break-in; gossip about a celebrity sighting. But while that
information is all grounded in a real-world place, on the web it is
scattered everywhere: in blogs, online newspapers, discussion threads,
government sites."