Looks like the New York Times is moving into the neighborhood-online world, according to this post…
The New York Times (NYT) will experiment with hyperlocal blogs, starting with two next Monday, Brownstoner reports. Each site will be led by a NYT journalist, but the paper will also use free neighborhood contributors and will work with CUNY journalism students…
The Times will effectively be competing with a slew of neighborhood blogs, aggregators like Outside.in, and potentially even Google (GOOG) ad boss Tim Armstong’s new investment, “Patch,” which also has a beta site in… South Orange, N.J.
So, Front Porch Forum welcomes the Grey Lady into our online space!
From Greg Sterling today…
Here’s a general article on the local market from Business Week. Many people have seen it and emailed me about it.
It bothers me because it’s pretty superficial…
Here’s the reality, which BW either doesn’t fully “get” or seem to want to explore in sufficient depth:
- Local is about offline — money spent in physical places.
- E-commerce is <4% of retail; 95%+ percent of product purchases happen offline. Increasingly those purchases start online.
- 99%+ of service business transactions happen offline/locally (yet online is the place where more and more people go to find service businesses).
- People may communicate via Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook to others around the globe but they live in physical places and when they travel they’re also in physical places, where they stay, eat, shop.
- SMB advertiser acquisition is hard, yes — no dispute there (see the last two years of blog posts)
- The central barrier to more geotargeted and local advertising by nationals has been the challenges of offline tracking in any given campaign
Looks like FreeCycle has built its own software after many years operating through Yahoo Groups. Check out this international web service at My Free Cycle.
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