While most of the larger sites that were initially affected–like Foursquare and Quora–have come back, lots of other sites are still having trouble. The New York Times special project site is still down, as is the news application page on ProPublica. Everyblock remains offline this morning. Heroku said it was partially back, but still working to restore shared databases. Two sites popular with the Hollywood crowd, Harry Knowles’ Ain’t It Cool News and Box Office Mojo were both down this morning.

One site that caught my eye on Twitter this morning was Blue Sombrero, which offers a service for clubs and organizations to register its members online for events. It took to Facebook this morning to vent its frustration and apologize to its customers. There are still, apparently, lots of Blue Sombreros out there. A site called EC2disabled.com purports to be a complete list of sites affected by the outage.

Amazon continues to send intermittent status updates via its dashboard, but it’s difficult to get much of an idea as to when they expect to be fully back to normal, though minutes ago it said it is starting to see “meaningful progress” in getting things under control. These are the latest messages from its EC2 status feed:

6:18 AM PT We’re starting to see more meaningful progress in restoring volumes (many have been restored in the last few hours) and expect this progress to continue over the next few hours. We expect that we’ll reach a point where a minority of these stuck volumes will need to be restored with a more time consuming process, using backups made to S3 yesterday (these will have longer recovery times for the affected volumes). When we get to that point, we’ll let folks know. As volumes are restored, they become available to running instances, however they will not be able to be detached until we enable the API commands in the affected Availability Zone.

Earlier it said:

2:41 AM PT We continue to make progress in restoring volumes but don’t yet have an estimated time of recovery for the remainder of the affected volumes. We will continue to update this status and provide a time frame when available.

And before that:

10:58 PM PT Just a short note to let you know that the team continues to be all-hands on deck trying to add capacity to the affected Availability Zone to re-mirror stuck volumes. It’s taking us longer than we anticipated to add capacity to this fleet. When we have an updated ETA or meaningful new update, we will make sure to post it here. But, we can assure you that the team is working this hard and will do so as long as it takes to get this resolved.

One of the companies listed on the EC2 Disabled site is Sony Online Entertainment. It’s probably just a coincidence, and its Web site is up this morning. However, it’s notable because of another ongoing outage now in its second day as well, of Sony’s Playstation gaming network. It’s latest official blog entry says the network may be down for a day or two.

The buzz about this outage, though Sony hasn’t addressed it, is that it’s the result of another attack by Anonymous, the loose coalition of hackers who are outraged at Sony’s recently settled legal fight with George Hotz. Known by the nom-de-keyboard GeoHot, Hotz had figured out a way to jailbreak the Playstation 3 so that it could run games not approved by Sony. Anonymous has denied involvement. The outage started Wednesday night and coincided with the release of three big games.

MSN has struck yet another local deal, this time with NBC Universal and Hearst, to provide local news and information to the Microsoft consumer portal.

The deal encompasses 36 markets in the U.S. and will provide 3,000 video clips per week, which will be integrated into MSN’s Local Edition early next year.

Hearst, which is privately held, and NBC Universal, which GE (GE) just sold a major chunk of to Comcast (CMCSA), both have significant local print and television assets.

The deal follows a number of local efforts by MSN, part of a larger trend by big Internet players to integrate a lot more local and community content and data into their offerings.

These include a big local module on MSN’s newly designed homepage as well as the acquisition of hyperlocal information site EveryBlock by Microsoft partner MSNBC.com this summer.

Here is MSN’s blog post on the deals:

MSN Local Edition Announces Partnerships with NBC Local Media and Hearst Television
MSN announces local partnerships

Posted by lisablogs on Wednesday, December 9, 2009 3:52 PM

With our recent launch of the preview of the new MSN homepage, we discussed several trends that influenced the design of our new MSN homepage. The growth of online video and local information were two key trends that influenced our design and both video and local information are extensively integrated into our new homepage. We also unveiled our new MSN Local Edition, a new site focused on providing comprehensive local information at http://local.msn.com.

Local information is booming–with 72% of people regularly consuming local news, 76% of people checking weather, and 86% of people searching for a map or driving directions. Video usage online is also skyrocketing in popularity, with 62% of online adults watching a video online and 35% have viewed a television show or movie online.* Both local and video also present a tremendous growth opportunity for advertisers, with local online advertising projected to grow to $10 billion by 2013.**

Today, we’re happy to announce two partnerships that will allow us to combine the power of both video and local information, and increase the amount of local information we can offer our customers. Through partnerships with NBC Local Media and Hearst Television, we will receive around 3,000 news video clips a week across 36 local media markets. While anyone in the US can receive comprehensive local information from MSN Local Edition, we’re pleased to partner with these industry leaders to offer more compelling and relevant local video clips to customers in 35 markets. The new video content will be available in January 2010.

NBC Local Media will offer local video clips from their “Locals Only” websites in Los Angeles, CA; San Francisco/Bay Area, CA; Dallas-Fort Worth, TX; Philadelphia, PA; Chicago, IL; New York, NY; Washington, DC; Connecticut, and Miami, FL.

Hearst Television will offer local video clips in Albuquerque, NM; Baltimore, MD; Boston, MA; Burlington, VT / Plattsburgh, NY; Cincinnati, OH; Des Moines, IA; Ft. Smith, AR; Greensboro / Winston-Salem, NC; Greenville, SC; Honolulu, HI; Jackson, MS; Kansas City, MO; Lancaster / Harrisburg, PA; Louisville, KY; Manchester, NH; Milwaukee, WI; Monterey, CA; New Orleans, LA; Oklahoma City, OK; Omaha, NE; Orlando, FLA; Pittsburgh, PA; Portland, ME; Sacramento, CA; and
West Palm Beach, FLA.

Cyrus Krohn
Director, MSN Local Edition

*Pew Internet & American Life Project, 2009

**Jupiter Research, 2008

The investment, whose size the Time Warner Inc. Web site declined to disclose, comes as news organizations seek more local information about high school sports, eateries and social events, in which they see an untapped market. Outside.In and a growing cadre of start-ups either hire people to write neighborhood news, or collect and organize dispatches from local citizens, news outlets or bloggers.

MSNBC.com, a joint venture of NBC Universal and Microsoft Corp. (MSFT), this summer acquired EveryBlock, which feeds crime reports, restaurant health inspections and other data to news organizations’ Web sites. AOL Inc. recently acquired the local-news network Patch.

CNN.com, which is part of Time Warner’s (TWX) Turner Broadcasting, plans to carry the Outside.In dispatches on its own Web site—the biggest push into local news so far by one of the most popular national news outlets in the country.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

Fwix, a one-year-old start-up backed by BlueRun Ventures, is one of a growing number of portals for “hyperlocal” news, a buzzword that refers to sites about schools, culture, gossip and other information on a neighborhood level. Other hyperlocal aggregators include Outside.In and EveryBlock. Some, like Patch, have their own staff, while others, like Fwix, mostly organize news written by bloggers and community members.

Now Fwix is launching a new advertising product, AdWire, and agreeing to split revenue with the people who write the local information, laying down the gauntlet against big news aggregators from Google on down.

Read the rest of this post on the original site

It looks like the local market is heating up even more, with MSNBC.com announcing the acquisition of Chicago-based EveryBlock.

MSNBC.com–a joint venture of Microsoft (MSFT) and GE (GE) unit NBC Universal–paid several million dollars for the “hyper-local” information site, which is up and running in 15 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Boston, sources said.

In June, Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL paid about $10 million to buy Patch Media.

The New York-based start-up is a platform that does deeply localized coverage of communities on a range of topics, from announcements to news to events to obituaries. It is aimed at competing with local newspapers and other media.

EveryBlock takes a slightly different approach, scouring a mass of publicly available data in a variety of U.S. cities from a variety of public records–such as crime stats, building permits and restaurant inspections–and reassembling them into more comprehensible and geographically relevant news feeds, depending on what a user asks for.

It also pulls up related Flickr photos and information from Web sites like Yelp and Daily Candy and can get very granular, down to keeping track of what is happening on your block or neighborhood.

Maps are also deeply integrated into EveryBlock, as it was on an earlier effort–ChicagoCrime.org–of founder Adrian Holovaty.

The innovative little start-up has a tiny staff of a half-dozen, still calls itself a “project” on its Web site and was started with $1.1 million in grant money won from the Knight News Challenge, an annual contest held by the Knight Foundation.

MSNBC.com is the news channel for Microsoft’s MSN portal, whose execs are very interested in weaving more local results into the site, as well as into the software giant’s new search offering, Bing.

The aim of having EveryBlock data integrated, for example, would be to create a local information dashboard on MSN.

Here’s a screen grab of EveryBlock’s take on my zip code in San Francisco, below (click on the image to make it larger)–and a video interview with Holovaty on YoChicago in early 2008:

“Today we’re releasing a new feature to find your local news by simply typing in a city name or zip code,” Google software engineers Andre Rohe and Rohit Ananthakrishna wrote in a post to the official company blog. “While we’re not the first news site to aggregate local news, we’re doing it a bit differently–we’re able to create a local section for any city, state or country in the world and include thousands of sources. We’re not simply looking at the byline or the source, but instead we analyze every word in every story to understand what location the news is about and where the source is located.”

Location-based news targeting. Pretty slick. Or it will be, once they get the 90210 bug worked out. Still, as Topix co-founder Rich Skrenta notes, Google’s a little late to this particular game. “This was pretty neat stuff when Topix launched in January 2004,” Skrenta quips. “Now if Google just added 50,000 vetted local blogs to the mix, and a community with 100K posts/day, they’ll have something.”