There are clearly a lot of applications that could use this type of data; national news sites that want to offer local headlines, mobile apps that show news based on your GPS location, and travel information services are just a few ideas that come to mind. As a demo, Outside.in has launched Near.ly, an application that sends local news to your Twitter account (via direct message) based on the address you provide.
The Outside.in API is an example of how most web businesses should evolve. While it started out as a destination site for local content (an incredibly competitive market), Outside.in has turned itself into a platform, allowing content providers to feed content into the system, and now, with its API, allowing developers to build applications using the aggregate data. And as these inputs and outputs grow, the service becomes more valuable to everyone in the ecosystem, including end users.
More about how the Outside.in API works in the video below: