Upon looking over their patch notes, it’s a pretty meaty update, fixing a slew of problems and adding in two big pieces of content. I can personally vouch for performance improvement, as the game ran smoother for me after the update, even with anti-aliasing turned on. However, there’s a specific aspect of the game the patch messed with that has left many players raging to the point many are unsubscribing from the game. It involves a little planet called Ilum, where players can go and engage in open world PvP for rewards.

Rewards for fighting other player-controlled characters, what could go wrong? Well, when the game is divided into two exclusive factions (Empire and Republic), and one side has a 3-1 population ratio, many critical problems arise.

Here’s what the game looks like to a republic player on Ilum. For those unfamiliar with the game, the red names represent enemies and green names are your allies. Looks like a barrel of monkeys, right?

The video shows how empire players are simply camping in a republic base waiting for players to re-spawn from death to just kill them over and over. With BioWare’s latest update, the people doing the camping are actually being rewarded for their horde mentality, with “valor” which unlocks access to better equipment.

Obviously this has left many players upset, with many taking to the official forums to vent their frustration. There are so many trying to access the site, that I’ve been looking at this waiting room image for around 15 minutes…

The problem has gotten so severe that they’ve had to switch their forums to “read-only” due to the negative flack they’ve received.

It’s not as though BioWare has ignored the plights of the republic players since the update, as they announced they’ll be taking the servers down today to try and patch the game yet again to fix the problem.

I’m at the end of the article and I still haven’t been able to log on to The Old Republic’s website. If there are any key updates made on the site I’ll update them here later. I’m guessing most of the people on there now are making “rage quitting” threads on the forums, and utilizing A LOT OF CAPITAL LETTERS.

Though I can’t access the site, here’s what various players have tweeted in regards to Ilum…it’s not pretty.

“Our collaboration with AOL’s Patch increases the scale and reach of the Serve platform and helps bridge the divide between online commerce and offline deals in a way that benefits merchants and consumers,” said Dan Schulman, Group President, Enterprise Growth, American Express. “This partnership showcases the breadth of the capabilities of the Serve platform to make digital payments hassle-free, user-friendly and part of the norm – and now through our work with Patch, we can add locally relevant to that list.”

In the Patch Deals FAQs, we learn that:

”Through this simple yet fresh way of redeeming local deals, Patch and Serve will offer users an even stronger connection to their communities and the businesses in their area,” commented Warren Webster, president of Patch Media. “We are proud to partner with Amex given their reputation for innovation in the marketplace, and are eager to see how our collaboration may further benefit our collective consumers.”

Interestingly, AOL’s TechCrunch blog ran an article called “Why I Want Google Offers And The Entire Daily Deals Business To Die” over the weekend.

The deals space is getting more and more crowded, making those services that aggregate deals for consumers all the more valuable.

Users will be able to sign up for Serve accounts via Patch sites this fall. The Patch Deals service is already live in a few select communities.

Outside.In will evidently become integrated with AOL’s Patch property – the hyperlocal news service, which sounds about right, considering hyperlocal is what Outside.In is all about.

Outside.In aggregates headlines and blog posts at the hyperlocal level, as well as links to events, local venues, etc.

Outside.In pitches itself as  the leading provider of hyperlocal business solutions for:

• Publishers to easily integrate hyperlocal news and information into sites and apps with Outside.in for Publishers
• Bloggers to get traffic from Outside.in and our growing network of partner sites with Outside.in for Bloggers

• Advertisers to reach local audiences in every neighborhood in the UnitedStates.
• Developers to innovate tomorrow’s local news experiences with our Hyperlocal API

The acquisition follows AOL’s pattern of buying up content-related sites. Other recent acquisitions include The Huffington Post and TechCrunch.

According to CrunchBase, Outside.In has raised $14.4 million in funding prior to the acquisition. This has reportedly come from Union Square Ventures, Milestone Venture Partners, the New York City Investment Fund, Marc Andreesen, Esther Dyson, John Seeley Brown, John Borthwick, George Crowley, etc.

How important is hyperlocal news to you in the grand scheme of things? Is it important enough that this niche of the news landscape, which is both so small and so potentially huge at the same time can find some real legs to stand on and become an important piece of our media consumption puzzles? 

As a New York Times piece points out, there have been various attempts at hyperlocal news, which have simply failed, which makes one wonder how much demand there is for this kind of online news. Still, AOL’s Patch.com, the focal point of the story seems to be doing better than most, but that’s with a very small number of pageviews for any given Patch community site (though collectively, the numbers aren’t so bad). 

Right now, Patch is only available for a handful of communities in 18 states and the District of Columbia. If expanded across the entire country, and potentially the entire world, one would have to imagine the pageviews being pretty high. The question is, will it make it that far?

How much demand is there, and are the local newspaper and TV sites sufficient enough for most people? Another question is how far down is it worth drilling? For example, in Ohio, there’s a site, not just for Canton, but for North Canton:

There are many possible factors and variables as to what could make a hyperlocal (especially at the neighborhood level) site work. Perhaps it depends on the neighborhood. Is there a lot of crime in the area? Are there interesting events going on? Does anything happen worth reporting on? 

I live in a pretty quiet neighborhood of a fairly quiet town (outside of Lexington) myself, and depending upon the range of coverage, I’m not sure I would find much value in a dedicated site to my area. Though on the other hand, while it is quiet, maybe there’s more going on than I realize, and am only oblivious to this because I do not have such a publication to read. 

Ethan Beute, commenting on our Facebook page makes a valid point: "I would not read about 10-year-old Timmy’s game winning double on a neighborhood site any more than I would read a generically-arranged-by-tag cutdown of a city-focused site."

You also have to consider that the smaller of an area a hyperlocal site is targeting, the smaller the pool of potential reporters will be. I can’t imagine that many people in my own neighborhood doing newsworthy things on a daily basis, let alone enough people to find stories specifically related to that neighborhood to report on – especially for a single publication. 

That’s not to say it can’t work. We’re in the very early stages of this space, and there’s no way we’ve seen the extent of innovation that will be realized in hyperlocal news. There are others out there trying to make it work. Patch has a good start, but has a very long way to go in terms of breadth of coverage. 

Would you read a publication dedicated to news about you neighborhood? Discuss in the comments or on our Facebook page.

City’s Best local editors and writers in each market have visited and selected the best food,  and entertainment destinations in each city creating directory listings for each. AOL will invite local users to chose the most popular spots.

Users can vote starting today on City’s Best  through November 30. Users can vote on categories including burgers, cheap eats, after work bar, sports bar, pizza, live music and family friendly restaurants.  A winner will be announced for each of the categories in all 25 markets on December 14.

During the voting, the businesses selected in each category will be featured on  City’s Best. MapQuest will integrate City’s Best content into its site and Patch will promote listings for businesses and communities.

The 25 markets selected for AOL’s 2010 City’s Best launch include: Atlanta, Austin, Baltimore, Boston, Charlotte, Chicago, Cleveland, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Houston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Miami, New York, Orlando, Philadelphia, Phoenix, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, St. Louis, Tampa Bay, Twin Cities and Washington, DC.
 

The initiative, which launched this fall, offers interships and coursework at local Patch publications to students under the guidance  of Patch’s editors.

Thirteen schools across the U.S. are already participating in the program as members of the PatchU network, learning about of Patch’s products, teams, and systems, as well as exposure to the company’s hyperlocal business model.

Patch recently debuted the PatchU program at Hofstra University on Long Island, New York, where enrollment has begun for a fall/winter internship offered jointly by Patch and Hofstra’s School of Communication. Through the arrangement, students will gain course credit and  journalism experience at Patch’s Mineola, NY publication, where they will be supervised and mentored by the Patch local editor for that community.

Students learn to pitch and write stories, cover local events, shoot and edit photos and videos, integrate content with social media and produce stories online using Patch’s content management system. The goal of the program is to equip students with the skills they need to be successful multimedia journalists and compete for jobs with the growing number of media companies that are looking for journalists in the multimedia space.

“Patch is committed to building strong relationships with colleges and universities that are preparing the journalists who will define the new media landscape,” said Warren Webster, President, Patch Media.

“Our continuing rapid growth gives us an incredible opportunity to provide cutting edge, real-world experience in various communities across the country to students who will become tomorrow’s editors and reporters, at Patch and elsewhere.”

Participating PatchU partner institutions include:

 Hofstra University School of Communication (founding partner)

 The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism

 University of North Carolina School of Journalism and Mass Communication

 Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism

 Missouri School of Journalism

 University of Connecticut Department of Journalism

 Indiana University School of Journalism

 Stanford University Graduate Program in Journalism

 Columbia College Chicago Journalism Department

 University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism

 University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communications & Journalism

 Seton Hall Department of Communication and The Arts

 Quinnipiac University Department of Journalism   

Patch launched its 100th site in August and plans to expand to more than 500 U.S. neighborhoods in 20 states by the end of 2010. Patch plans to hire more than 500 additional journalists this year and expects to be the largest hirer of full-time journalists in the U.S. in 2010.

AOL plans to hire 500 journalists to support its Patch expansion and it will likely be the largest hirer of full-time journalists in the U.S. this year.

"Today’s launch of our 100th site is a significant milestone for us. We began with just three Patch communities in February 2009, and have since made incredible progress toward fulfilling our core mission of providing comprehensive information and trusted, professional news coverage to towns and communities," said Warren Webster, President, Patch Media.

AOL hopes its Patch network will be positioned to tap an estimated $20 billion in local online advertising dollars. Each Patch site is managed by one professional local editor, along with freelancers focused on covering news in a specific community.

Patch sites have launched in California, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Virginia. The 2010 expansion includes plans to extend Patch’s reach into more than a dozen new states including Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Washington and Wisconsin.

"All news is essentially local, and the pace at which Patch has grown shows that the demand for meaningful community news and information is alive and well," said Phil Meyer, Professor Emeritus in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a member of the Patch Editorial Advisory Board.
 

Starting today users can opt in via a link to try out the new MapQuest. The new redesign will replace the old version of MapQuest in about a month.

New features include:

One-box search for finding directions, maps and businesses;

*Improved My Maps with a simplified login process using other services (AOL, OpenID, Yahoo, Google, Facebook and Twitter);

*The ability to save and customize information, including MyMaps trip itineraries, and share it with others via social networks, including Facebook and Twitter;

*Ways to plan and personalize travel with notes, landmarks and short cuts; and

*Integration of Patch’s local directory information into MapQuest’s search results

MapQuest has also introduced a new logo. The company says the goal of the new logo is to make it "simple, clean and modern while remaining vibrant and fun."

"We are committed to providing accurate maps and directions to millions of people every day," said Christian Dwyer, Senior Vice President and General Manager,MapQuest.

  "And under the new leadership at AOL, we have invested in creating a new user experience that helps users discover what is there, nearby and along the way, making it more than how to get from Point A to Point B. The MapQuest evolution is underway and aims to transcend how consumers engage with maps by adding seamless context and sharing capabilities."

MapQuest is the second most popular mapping service behind Google Maps with 49.1 million users in May, according to comScore.

Patch.org will partner with community foundations and other organizations to launch sites and bring local news and information to communities that lack adequate news media and online local information.

For each of the sites launched via Patch.org, a professional journalist will produce news and information about the area and manage user-contributed events, announcements, photos and video. Patch.org will consider funding and partnership requests for other appropriate projects.  AOL says all profits will be returned to where the sites are based.

"In a shifting media landscape, the loss of local and community newspapers has created a troubling gap in some communities making reliable objective news and information about critical issues such as local government, schools and services unavailable," said Warren Webster, President, Patch Media.

"Patch.org will empower residents of these neighborhoods with professional journalism, data and information to help shed light on the issues that are so important to their daily lives."

Patch.org will be managed with the support of AOL’s subsidiary Patch Media. The charitable foundation will operate along with Patch’s Give 5 program, which donates advertising space and employee volunteer time to charitable organizations in local communities.
 

Patch is a local news platform focused on smaller towns and Going is a local platform for people to find and share information about things to do in a number of cites.

"Local remains one of the most disaggregated experiences on the Web today — there’s a lot of information out there but simply no way for consumers to find it quickly and easily," said Tim Armstrong, AOL’s Chairman and CEO.

Tim Armstrong

"It’s a space that’s prime for innovation and an area where AOL has a significant audience and a valuable mapping service in MapQuest. Going forward, local will be a core area of focus and investment for AOL."

Armstrong was an early investor in Patch he told AOL employees in a memo and recused himself from the acquisition process. He also said he stood to make a profit on the sale of Patch but decided to forgo that and just receive his seed capital in AOL shares when it separates from Time Warner. The separation is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

Patch currently has a presence in five communities and has plans in the works to add a dozen more by the end of the year.

Going is a local community catering to 20-somethings and is available in 30 U.S. cites with plans to add several more this year.

AOL’s network of local services is the largest online local network, reaching more than 54 million unique visitors per month.