All the news that's fit to print (about your block of flats)

News organisations such as this one do the best they can to record events deemed relevant to a particular country and indeed the world, but what about stories that are of interest only to a single apartment block?

Residents in a particular postcode and in some cases on a single block may soon be able to read news tailored to their own 'micro-geography' thanks to a site which trawls the web for information relevant to a highly specific location.

The 'news' - which could include anything from a recent crime to a planning application having been lodged or a picture having been taken nearby - is then packaged up on a map so readers can see where events relevant to their location took place.

"A regular journalist would never write about a mundane planning application, but if you live in that block it's totally news to you," Adrian Holovaty, founder of the site, called EveryBlock, said.

EveryBlock, which so far only covers Chicago, New York, and San Francisco, works by trawling publicly available databases for information such as addresses using a process known as 'scraping'.

At a simple level, the data could include figures such as crime statistics, property records, even council-conducted restaurant inspections, so that, for instance, you could be made aware that your local takeaway was not sufficiently clean for the health authorities.

But other information - such as photos on websites like Flickr, videos on YouTube and even restaurant reviews can now also be tied to a particular location thanks to a technology known as 'geo-tagging.'

Engines such as EveryBlock's can thus scour the web and rapidly gather all the information relevant to a particular point on the earth's surface.

The service is just one of many that are becoming available on what is known as the 'geo-web', which refers to the fact that an increasing amount of the information on the web is highly location-specific.

In some cases the information may simply be a pool of addresses, which a web-based tool known as a 'mash-up' overlays on a map, but in others it may be data captured by a device with built-in GPS technology - for instance a phone camera - that allows it to be traced to a particular point on the globe.

"Essentially this is about bringing a new class of data to the web, and mixing that content with what's already out there (such as maps), to come up with meaningful answers to people's questions," Sean Gorman, chief executive of FortiusOne, a location-based services company, said.

One application that was envisaged at the Where 2.0 conference in San Francisco was allowing fire fighters to relate housing data to information about the path of a bushfire in order to make evacuations more efficient.

Another involved a drinks company plotting its beer sales on a map and then comparing that with census data such as age or income in the area to do determine any relevant relationship.

The are also more social uses, though. "You can also use it to find our where your friends are," Josh Babetski, technical officer with Map Quest, a mapping company, said. "So if I decide I want to go for a pint, and I find out I've got three friends within a block, I know who to ask to join me."

According to Google, there has been a 300 per cent increase in the past year of the amount of information on the web that is 'geo-tagged', meaning that it could be incorporated into a location-based service like EveryBlock's.

"Geography can be an incredibly useful lens through which to look at data about the world, and a useful way to organise the information that we find," John Hanke, director of geo-services at Google and the man responsible for Google Earth, the company's satellite imaging tool, said.