The Zipper has many ways for you to fine tune the local news and local gossip information to meet your needs. There are two main filtering abilities available…the Channels and the Locations. The Channels are geared around topical categories such as news, gossip, deals, sports, music, etc and they\’re very handy. The Locations are pretty much what they sound like. They allow you to narrow all the available information by certain location qualities. The default locations are Your Location (your home base), Current Location, and different specific categories such as your high school or college and even private locations/channels. Let\’s turn our attention to the Current Location feature to figure out how to use this in your eternal quest to find the best local news and local gossip.

So how does Current Location differ from Your Location? In most cases, they may very well be the same thing but not when you\’re traveling. Your Location means your home town. No matter where you are on the Earth, Your Location will remain the same unless you permanently move somewhere else. Current Location owes its existence to a really cool function of building the Zipper to work with your smart phone such Iphones or Android phones. These phones can keep track of your location and in fact, they need to do so for all kinds of features such as the GPS tracker app you probably use. It\’s pretty cool that we can piggy back off of this ability to bring you local news and local gossip according to different locations. Otherwise, what\’s the point of even have the word local in the title? So how can we use the Current Location filter on the zipper?

The first obvious choice is while traveling to another city or area. There are all kinds of reasons you may want the local news from that area you\’re traveling in. It may be as simple as finding out why they traffic suddenly blew apart and figuring out what to do about it. It may be to find events in the area that are new and even spur of the moment. You can always check a website for this info but the information tends to be static and may or may not work. For example, maybe the website talks about that really cool anime and comic art exhibit at the local museum. You look at the website and it says it\’s sold out but you go online and search the Zipper to find a zip about how you can still get stand by tickets for the 4pm showing even though the site says it\’s booked. Why do I bring up this example? Because it actually happened to us at the San Fran Picasso exhibit. Local news can be powerful even if you\’re just on vacation. Hey, why can\’t we empower having fun! This goes for impromptu concerts, deals at restaurants, and don\’t forget local gossip.

Let\’s say you\’re visiting LA or New York. You check out the local gossip channel on the Zipper under the Current Location setting. You see zips of how Katy Perry is signing Kitty Purree stuffed animals at some club or how they\’re filming a scene of the latest installment of Twilight over by a highway underpass. How cool could this type of network for local gossip be to create memories that you just can\’t buy!

If you get a little homesick, you can always flip the location setting to Your Location but while traveling, nothing\’s cooler than getting the local news and local gossip scoop as if you were….a local!

Dennis Jarvis writes extensively about local news and local gossip smart phone apps.