I stumbled across this on one of the Wired blogs (Epicenter). Have you heard of Topix? It’s a news aggregator that uses a geolocating algorithm they’ve developed to get all the news relevant to any zip code or city from all of its 50,000 news sources. Punch in the coordinates for Jefferson City and you get all the stories out of all the local papers, without repeats, in one place.

You can also use Topix to search 5,500 public company and industry verticals, 48,000 celebrities and musicians, 1,500 sports teams and personalities. You used to have to pay big money to do a Lexis-Nexis search to get info like this or pay a clipping service like Burrelles. Now anyone can do it for free.

According to Epicenter (a Wired blog), Topix is backed by Tribune, Gannett and McClatchy. This is one of those things that’s hard to describe but kind of cool in practice. Check it out.