By Alexandra Berzon

The Internet has spawned countless virtual communities, but it also a place for real-world places such as Brooklyn’s 11215 zip code, otherwise known as Park Slope.

Brooklyn

The intellectual neighborhood is home to early web innovator and author Steven Johnson, whose newly launched Outside.in Website is a community aggregator built around zip codes and zoomed-in Google maps that serves up local blogs, newspaper articles, and user-generated reviews and comments.

Outside.in is a play for the territory that sites like Yelp, Craig’s List and others have circled, but Mr. Johnson thinks he can do it differently. Right now he’s focused on building up a critical mass of users attracted to the site’s one-stop-shop for local content based on a very specific location.

Outside.in has been live since October, but got its first bit of attention this week after officially launching, adding key new features and announcing a $900,000 round of funding from early backers Union Square Ventures.

“We think it’s a pretty cool innovation to see not just restaurant reviews, but real conversations that people are having in the neighborhood,” said Mr. Johnson.

The site aims to become a destination to find out what people are saying about the local public school, or a new development project going up in the neighborhood, or a mugging that happened last night on the block. Outside.in automatically culls content from 1500 local blogs around the country and adds in the conversation under appropriate zip codes. New features allow users to find out and contribute information about a specific place, and to have their own pages.

Translating the experience of being in a specific location into the global reach of the Internet has become an obsession of web developers, advertisers and funders. O’Reilly Media, for example, is set to hold the Where 2.0 Conference in May to discuss mapping, location-specific sites and targeted advertising.

That’s also been on the mind of Mr. Johnson, an early web developer, magazine writer and book author, who has thought critically about the intersection between cities and technology. There’s no doubt that he can write eloquently about the theories of why Outside.in should work, but whether he can turn those theories into a viable business is a different question.

Analyst Greg Sterling said that so far, attempts by hyper-local sites to generate revenues have been difficult because successful, automated location-targeted advertising tools haven’t been developed to the extent of national banner ads and search-term-based advertising.

“For the advertiser, the proposition is very compelling, to have super-targeted ads that are zip-code-specific, that’s very desirable,” said Mr. Sterling. “But the question is how do you, as a publisher, get those advertisers on board? So far, the tools on the back-end have not been robust enough to reach the right customers.”

Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures is betting that those types of location-targeted tools are going to be included in the next wave of web advertising, and thinks Outside.in could be well-positioned when they are. He sees the site as a kind of personalized all-encompassing newspaper service.

“I know in the neighborhood I live in, in New York, there’s a lot of stuff happening, but nobody is really targeting the ten-block radius around Fred Wilson’s home. Going out and grabbing all that content wherever it’s created and packaging it in slices that are geographically laid out, that’s a really compelling service,” said Mr. Wilson.