Where I live, Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, we have an excellent hyper-local blog called MyBallard.com. It's a great resource for news that I actually care about but isn't at all interesting to people outside the neighborhood. The company behind it has developed blogs for many other neighborhoods and seems to be reasonably successful at it.

http://forargyll.com/ is a brilliant example of this--they were originally a group set up to launch a community radio station for a remote part of Scotland. This was unsuccessful for a variety of (mainly technical) reasons, so they turned to the web instead.

Now they produce a daily-updated, hyper-local blog covering a huge, sparsely populated area. It's full of pics of local people, debate on local issues and news not covered elsewhere. (People will buy a paper, or read a blog, if you print a picture of someone they know. Why do you think local papers print pages and pages of kids who are starting school every September?)

This is an area that didn't have a local press to speak of before. There was one weekly local newspaper, but nothing on this scale enabling people who might be 50 or 100 miles apart discuss shared issues instantly.

That's a cool example. I was thinking that hyper-local really only made sense for densely packed urban environments. Good to see that I was wrong in that assumption.