What does Hyberlocal mean? | IT THOUGHT OF THE DAY

Sometime words just start repeating themselves all around you. Over the past two weeks, I have heard the term “hyperlocal” used about a dozen times in tech podcasts and magazines, I figured that it was time to explicitly discuss its meaning.

The Information Technology (IT) Vocabulary Builder series aims to deliver a very concise summary of a currently relevant topic to Information Professionals. It is done mostly by collecting a small number of highly relevant web links to save you the time of combing through search results yourself.

So, what exactly does hyperlocal mean?

This is how Wikipedia defines it:

“The term hyperlocal can be used as a noun in isolation or as a modifier of some other term (e.g. news). When used in isolation it refers to the emergent ecology of data (including textual content), aggregators, publication mechanism and user interactions and behaviors which centre on a resident of a location and the business of being a resident.

A new term used to refer to someone or something that is the best at connecting people, locally.”

Basically, it is the concept of focusing on the world within the span of your personal space. Targeting marketing to a single person, for example. Or you searching and caring about only things that impact of influence just you. If local interests are a subset of regional ones, then hyperlocal interests are a further subdivision. Negatively, it is the concentration of your concern to just you with little regard for the space outside your arm swing.

So what is the connection to the Information Age and Information Technology? Before our current tech age, focusing on a personal space this small was impossible. It is only through the massive data sets that are freely available on the web combined with the processing power locally and that is mobile that one can even consider this sort of laser focus. You can’t get hyperlocal news from a newspaper, it has to appeal to too many readers over too large an area. You can’t get it from TV that has an even larger span with even less ability to target an ad campaign. No, you can only get this from one person, access to the Internet, and the ability to search and cull.

The implications to society, individuals, marketing, news delivery, and content generation are huge. IT Professionals need to understand, employ, and relate to this paradigm change in information processing.

Here are some other great sites that discuss this issue: