John Kelsey writes today…
In 2005, Jonathan Weber launched New West Publishing, an online independent local media company designed to serve the “culture, economy, politics, environment and life style of the Rocky Mountain West.” Today NewWest.net is structured as a regional publication that also focuses in on seven local markets. He reiterated… the difficulty of selling local online advertising. Success requires patience and persistence, the blocking and tackling of the online local media business. At the same time, you need talented players and a good strategy. These could be described as great content and local authenticity.
What I find most refreshing about New West is that Weber resisted the forces encouraging him to replicate his platform in other markets (New South, New China, etc.). Unlike most other entrepreneurs in the city guide and free DA business, Weber said, let’s do this right in one market area and then, and only then, consider expansion.
Great content and local authenticity… that’s a winner. And that combination appears to be in short supply.
Greg Sterling writes today about Yahoo’s new trial service called Neighbors…
Yahoo! has introduced a very interesting new feature on Local: Neighbors. A new tab will appear, “Neighbors,” that offers a community discussion area and organizing tool…
Andy Sack, former CEO of Judy’s Book, shared some lessons learned this week on his blog…
The first mistake: we weren’t aggressive enough in customer acquisition…
The second mistake: we expanded out of Seattle in August 2005 and went national… Ultimately, this decision prevented us from focusing on the customer acquisition problem I mentioned above as well as other improvements that would have made our product more sticky and compelling…
Interesting insights for Front Porch Forum to consider as we look to expand beyond our initial community.
It’s a bit apples-to-oranges, but I wonder how Craiglist in San Francisco compared to Judy’s Book in Seattle before each decide to expand beyond their original city? My sense is that Craigslist benefited from a much more solid homebase than Judy’s Book… but I don’t have any numbers to back that up.
David Ardia’s post just alerted me to the fact that iBrattleboro is being sued for libel over something written in the comment section of their site.
Steve Outing offers his “lessons learned” on the just-dead Enthusiast Group (“experiment in grassroots media and social networking (as applied to niche sports)”). Here’s one of his lessons that caught my eye…
If citizen-content-exclusive destination sites don’t make sense when it comes to hyperlocal content, what else can you do with user-submitted content? Another approach is to focus on micro-targeting the citizen submissions. I’m intrigued by websites like YourStreet.com, which geo-tags local news and information and puts it on a map mash-up. Using a model like YourStreet’s, a news organization might create a map service that presents hyperlocal (geo-tagged) content on neighborhood maps.
While I live in Boulder, Colorado, I couldn’t care less about news from schools or community organizations serving neighborhoods across town. But I care a lot about anything to do with the school near my house that my daughter attends. I care about the announcement from the local fire station about staffing changes. So targeting that sort of news and information to me is a powerful service that a news company can provide. (Of course, I’d want the option to expand the range of micro-news and information that I view.)
If you can gather, slice and dice hyperlocal citizen news and information, think too about disseminating it outside of your own website. Create a customizable widget that a neighborhood blogger, say, can include on his site to offer his readers links to news and information pertinent to his neighborhood. That’ll drive traffic back to your website, or might include ads that you place within the widget. Win-win.
If a news website can filter the minutiae (from a wide variety of sources, internal and external to the news organization) that’s relevant to a specific online user, and present that in context with the professionally produced output of the news organization, then I think you’ve got something valuable.
Cameron Ferroni of Marchex wrote today about the special place Craigslist holds for him…
… it really boils down to the fact that the simplicity of the experience and the personal nature of the interactions make this stand head and shoulder above any other online service of its type. For those of us in the industry we would do well to take this to heart – and maybe, just maybe, spend less time worried about our slick UI, our SEO strategies, and our mapping technology, and spend more time worried about the specific value proposition for users.
Some of our members compare Front Porch Forum to Craigslist along these points… simple and extremely effective on a few fronts… period. We get lots of interesting suggestions for new features and we’ve implemented some and will add others over time… but I’m excited to stay true to our initial premise of “simple and effective.”
Maps are important to neighborhood level online social networking. From an announcement received today…
Placebase, Inc., the makers of the Pushpin online mapping platform, today announced a partnership with Urban Mapping Inc. (UMI), the leading provider of enhanced of local interactive content. As part of this agreement, Urban Mapping’s neighborhood boundary database will be available on the Pushpin platform. A demonstration site is available at: http://www.pushpin.com/urbanmapping…
This is similar to what the good folks at Maponics provide I believe.
Also, from Google Maps today… people can now drag address markers for businesses and houses to a more precise location. So Google is asking its millions of users to do the honing in that it can’t currently do through brute force. Seems like a good move.
I wonder how many addresses we have in the United States? We have about 300 million people and 2.5 or so people/household… so about 120 million households (some of those in multi-unit buildings) plus businesses, institutions, etc. I wonder what percentage of these millions of buildings could have their location refined via Google’s registered users?
And a wish… that the Google Maps API used better data… or, perish the thought, that is used the same data as Google Maps.
Ghost of Midnight is an online journal about fostering community within neighborhoods, with a special focus on Front Porch Forum (FPF). My wife, Valerie, and I founded FPF in 2006... read more