Weekly News Digest

MetaCarta, Inc. (www.metacarta.com), a provider of geographic information retrieval and search solutions, announced the MetaCarta Local Alerts Service for Publishers. Local Alerts inform people about news stories, classified ads, community events, restaurant reviews, and even social media, related to their favorite city, town, or neighborhood. Online publishers can now deliver geo-targeted content to users regardless of where they live, work, or play.

Features of Local Alerts for publishers include the following:

• 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.

With MetaCarta, you can ask for information about the Middle East, Western Europe, and central Africa and not have to type in all the country names in which you are interested. Or you can ask for information about New York City, and MetaCarta will also find information mentioning the Bronx, Brooklyn, or Queens even though the specific term New York City is not mentioned.

MySanAntonio.com is the first organization to offer this free service to its readers. MySanAntonio.com is a partnership between the San Antonio Express-News, a Hearst Corp. newspaper, and KENS 5, a CBS affiliate.