On January 25, 2018, Google announced Google Bulletin to a live audience in Nashville Tennessee. The people of Nashville and Oakland, California will be the first two markets getting “Bulletin”.

From the official Bulletin page:

Bulletin is an app for contributing hyperlocal stories about your community, for your community, right from your phone. Bulletin makes it effortless to put a spotlight on inspiring stories that aren’t being told.

The first Bulletin users will need Android phones, although Bulletin will soon be available to everyone, everywhere.

Bulletin will likely require users to be logged in to a Google Account. If you use Gmail or Google Maps, you already have one of those. There is no specific “app” to use, users will simply create content right from their phones.

I personally like the “bulletin” name, although Google will likely change it someday. Back in the day before the Internet was popular, people used “Bulletin Board Systems”, which were online systems where local users could communicate. It seems that Bulletin will bring some of this back.

I am guessing that “Bulletins” will appear right in search results just like Google Posts did.

Bulletins will likely essentially be like blog posts although users will not need an app or a website to create a bulletin. This could prove to be very useful to cover local events and breaking news.

Bulletins will have a creative commons style license so existing journalists can reference hyper-local content in their news articles. Bulletins will be able to be linked to, liked and shared as well, and Bulletin authors will have profile pages where past posts may be seen.

For more information on Bulletin, be sure to see this article by Sami Cone who was at the Nashville launch event and took this YouTube video of the launch:

Len

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