Joyce Carroll wrote a wonderful article about how neighborhoods are using Front Porch Forum for this week’s Essex Reporter.
When Henry, a six-toed marmalade tabby cat with a penchant for adventure, wandered off last Halloween, his owner did not have to resort to posting flyers around the neighborhood. Instead, Sue McCormack turned to her neighbors via the Front Porch Forum.
McCormack, a member of the Maple Street Forum, is one of hundreds of Essex and Essex Junction residents who take advantage of this service. The forum aims to recapture the days when advice was traded over backyard fences, and recipes were shared during visits to the neighbor’s front porch.
Julie Miller-Johnson, who spearheaded the Countryside Front Porch Forum, said 132 members, about half of the neighborhood, have joined the service. Their forum is active, she said, with postings coming through every couple of days.
In some cases, the forum has become a way to reach out to those in need. Miller-Johnson recalled a fire in the neighborhood this past winter. Neighbors, she said, were actively communicating about ways in which to help the family.
“We’re not a front porch society anymore,” she said, adding, “The forum changed the way this neighborhood feels. People talk to each other.”
The New York Times website today asks readers about what online social networking services they use and how. I see one Front Porch Forum mention in the comments already… thanks Julie!
I’ll be leading a workshop at the COMMUNITYMATTERS07 conference in Burlington, VT, Oct. 23, 2007. About the conference…
COMMUNITYMATTERS07 is the next annual gathering of the Orton Family Foundation and PlaceMatters, where a national network of practitioners comes together to learn, share, inspire and seed innovation in place, collectively elevating the art and science of planning for vibrant, sustainable communities.
Virtual Neighborhood: Building Local Community Online
Community does indeed matter. And virtual online connections are creating and enhancing real communities. This workshop will examine Front Porch Forum and other online services that foster community at the neighborhood level. Participants will investigate trends in social networking, local online and community building at the neighborhood level… and their intersection. These topics are examined in depth at http://frontporchforum.com/blog
Location, location, location… right? Real estate keeps coming up recently. Front Porch Forum has been hearing from realtors lately… interested in what neighborhoods are doing with their FPF forums. So I found these postings from the blogosphere interesting…
First, from Greg Swann’s real estate blog…
I’m quoting from David Gibbons from Zillow.com. He wrote these remarks in a comment… How can web-based vendors build databases of neighborhood expertise?
What you are seeing in the neighborhood space is the lack of any predefined neighborhood database. It’s never been done before and so, while there’s a great place to start when building a taxonomy of regions at any other level, neighborhoods are tough to build. The 6,500 neighborhoods currently defined on Zillow were done by hand. We’ve talked this through with outside.in – they took the same approach. The solution is to allow homeowners to collaboratively describe their neighborhoods and we’ll iterate towards that but even homeowners seldom agree on neighborhood designations and boundaries. It’s an interesting problem to solve.
Greg goes on to say…
On-line neighborhood databases are the virtual sex of real estate. This, from Seth Godin’s All Marketers Are Liars: The Power of Telling Authentic Stories in a Low-Trust World, is how you get neighborhood information:
Arthur Riolo is a world-class storyteller. Arthur sells real estate in my little town north of New York City. He sells a lot of real estate — more than all his competitors combined. That’s because Arthur doesn’t sell anything. Anyone can tell you the specs of a house or talk to you about the taxes. But he doesn’t. Instead, Arthur does something very different. He takes you and your spouse for a drive. You drive up and down the hills of a neighborhood as he points out house after house (houses that aren’t for sale). He tells you who lives in that house and what they do and how they found the house and the name of their dog and what their kids are up to and how much they paid. He tells you a story about the different issues in town, the long-simmering rivalries between neighborhoods and the evolution and imminent demise of the Mother’s Club. Then, and only then, does Arthur show you a house.
It might be because of Arthur’s antique pickup truck or the fact that everyone in town knows him or the obvious pleasure he gets from the community, but sooner or later, you’ll buy a house from Arthur. And not just because it’s a good house. Because it’s a good story.
Forget the silly, way-too-large neighborhood definitions, forget the duplication of records, the omissions, the errors. This is what a database can never do.
In less than a year, Front Porch Forum is brimming with neighborhood stories churned up by 10,000+ messages among nearby neighbors.
And Peter K. at the Local Onliner has several recent real estate postings about large national efforts, including…
Zillow.com update… “[CEO] Barton noted that Zillow now has 250,000 listings, and that 50,000 agents have created custom profiles. ‘350,000 Realtors come to the site every month.'”
CraigsList update… “is now getting 8 billion page views a month from 450 cities in 50 countries. He also noted that the service is up to 23 staffers, and will be adding a couple of programmers.”
An interesting piece on MediaShift by Jennifer Woodard Maderazo…
With the plethora of social networking sites, it’s easy to come to the quick conclusion that what we are doing on these sites — chatting up strangers, lurking on people’s profiles, spying on friends — is just a waste of time. But there is one site that is more than just an unhealthy habit: Photo-sharing site Flickr is a photography school, art gallery and a sandbox for experimentation. On Flickr, bad photographers get schooled, mediocre ones get better and some even rise to the top as stars — all supported by an immense, and sometimes intimate, international community.
When Flickr founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield launched Flickr in 2004 they could not have expected the level of success it’s enjoyed among its users. There were already many other photo-sharing sites out there — among them Yahoo Photos, which would later be replaced by Flickr after Yahoo purchased the site . But none really had the ease of use and the kind of community tools that Flickr offered.
The opening — much online social networking is a waste of time — caught my attention as a view shared by many folks I know, but seldom seen online or mentioned by Web 2.0 cheerleaders. I know some folks who are gaga over Flickr for just the reasons outlined by MediaShift. Read the full piece.
KOB comments on the MediaShift site regarding the Front Porch Forum posting there…
Washington DC neighborhoods have been long served by mailing lists and some have more than 3,000 subscribers. The content, all user generated is, in sum, similar to Front Porch.
Front Porch sounds like an effort to give a little more structure to ad hoc mailing lists.
But I have to question Front Porch’s requirements, if I read this post correctly, to make its lists closed as well as require ID in a posts.
DC’s mailing lists aren’t closed. I subscribe to several. And you don’t have to include your name in a post. An ID requirement may discourage some people to post crime information or freely express concerns.
Front Porch is a reminder that mailing lists are very effective and popular. Neighborhood Mailing lists are so entrenched in DC that I’m not convinced that DC’s growing number of neighborhood blogs will necessarily unseat mailing lists as the primary source of neighborhood intel.
I agree with KOB’s support of DC’s neighborhood mailing lists. Blogs are great, but they’re one person’s view (or maybe from a few), whereas the mailing lists are from the crowd.
Front Porch Forum’s approach is a departure from DC’s neighborhood mailings lists though. Our aim is to help neighbors connect and foster community within the neighborhood. Our scale is roughly 10% of DC’s lists, that is, a few hundred households. Only residents may join and post. And all postings are clearly labeled with the author’s name, street, and email address.
I’m familiar with some of the DC mailing list (and other places like Austin, etc.), and many are popular and very helpful to a lot of people. But they don’t do much of what FPF’s neighborhood forums are doing… that is, helping nearby neighbors really get to know each other in person.
I lived in and participated on the Mount Pleasant mailing list in DC 10-12 years ago (prehistoric by internet time)… and it was great. However, I actually knew or had the chance to get to know less than 5-10% of those posting. In my FPF neighborhood, that’s reversed… there’s probably only 5-10% that I won’t ever meet, and with 90% of my neighborhood using the service that’s a huge shift.
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