Marchex is working on a new network of neighborhood blogs called MyZip. If I read the description correctly, they posit that the $50/month paid to a blogger in their network will provide sufficient incentive to keep up a five-post/week pace indefinitely… that’s about $2.30/posting. Hmm… could be interesting.
I would neither blog about or read regularly someone’s daily blog about my neighborhood… and the $2.30/post payment somehow makes it even less likely. What I want… to hear from and interact constructively with lots of my neighbors. That’s our aim with Front Porch Forum.
Time will tell. Lots of room for new ideas. Marchex doesn’t have the MyZip site up yet.
Front Porch Forum is asked frequently to offer a social networking services for local nonprofits and other groups. Looks like Change.org may be able to help these good folks now (from TechCrunch)…
Change.org uses social networking to help social causes. For the launch, they’ve already partnered with 50 non-profits, like CARE, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International. Any other non-profit can launch their own network as well, as long as you have a government approved tax ID number.
They have modules for all an organization’s main needs: events, fund raising, forums, blogs, members, and posting photos/video. I really like how Change.org is evolving overall. The site is about connecting people passionate about a particular cause and not engaging in a shouting match or symbolic gestures of online support.
Other useful services for non-profit work include Wild Apricot, Idealist.org, Tree Nation, and Kevin Bacon’s Six Degrees.
TechCruch reports today that FatDoor.com just landed $5.5M of funding and a new CEO from Yahoo…
Fatdoor aims to connect you with your neighbors by providing a localized social network for your physical community. Although the site will be in private beta until the spring of 2008, a handful of details have been publicly available since at least June. The website will integrate with Microsoft Virtual Earth to display local business and residential listings on an interactive map. Once users claim their listings, they can add profiles and put down their interests. Users can then plan events and form local interest groups with the site.Fatdoor will also pull in information from other web services such as business reviews from Yelp, events listings, and driving directions. Users will be able to add their own business reviews but they won’t be displayed outside of the network on Yelp’s website. Fatdoor’s homepage will display something akin to the Facebook news feed with information about upcoming events and recently created groups.
So my FatDoor scorecard reads… great space with huge potential, new CEO with impressive credentials, money to burn… this could prove interesting. Or not… time will tell.
Most Silicon Valley successes are made by roping in some small percentage of the population over a huge geographical expanse… e.g., 5% of the United States on board some website would be 15 million people… yipee.
But to succeed at the local or neighborhood level, you need a relatively large percent of the population in a small area (e.g., our Front Porch Forum has 25% of our pilot city registered, but Burlington, VT only contains a fraction of 1% of the U.S. population). This is a very different game and one that most mainstream dot.coms and start-ups aren’t pursuing well or at all… thus the opportunity.
Local artist Katharine Montstream posted this alarming note in her neighborhood forum this week and shared it with the FPF Neighborhood Volunteers network too…
Could everyone keep an eye out for Grammy Jane’s car? My mother-in-law was at my studio at ONE MAIN STREET on friday at 10am and just popped in for a moment to get an address. She put her keys down on the floor of the car. A young man said hi to her and then followed her into the studio. He pretended to look at my prints in the lobby, but he was actually watching Jane. Once she was in my studio, he ran out and stole her car. She saw him driving off, and police were there quickly, but no recovery of the car.
It’s a silver HONDA sedan, 7 yrs old, with BLACK HANDLES, and possibly still with an OBAMA sticker on the back. The car could be in NYC in parts, it could be at Dunkin Donuts in White River Junction, it could be abandon in the Shaw’s parking lot. At this point the police can’t do much, but please keep an eye out for a silver Honda sedan.
This is a hardship for Jane as insurance only covers 80% of the vehicle, rental car insurance only covers 20.00 per day with rates around 40.00, she has to change her condo locks, replace the car seat, forget about the four snows she put on last week, and replace her chair for watching grandkids soccer games. KEEP YOUR EYES PEELED. This vehicle might be around; it’s totally possible.
So while Front Porch Forum didn’t play a direct role in the good news that follows, it did provide a surprising tale to our Vermont members…
The police called this morning. Two men were found sleeping in the car in FLORIDA, they ran the plates and it’s Jane’s car! hurray. It will be back in four days with 2,000 more miles, but it will be back!
Kirby Winfield offers a good post today, for as far as it goes, about helping people connect to their local communities through the internet…
It’s been said that individuals today are increasingly disconnected from their communities. They are “bowling alone”; i.e., although the number of people who bowl has increased in the last 20 years, the number of people that bowl in leagues has decreased. Since people bowl alone they do not participate in social interaction and civic discussions that might occur in a league environment.
The Internet has been criticized for its isolating impact on society. In many cases increased engagement in online activities results in exacerbation of the “bowling alone” phenomenon.
There is a huge market void in local online media. With the exception of business search/reviews, no one has solved for community connection and conversation at the neighborhood or town level at scale. This brings me to the opportunity of “digitizing local.”
Some of the most passionate and well informed citizens in the country still communicate about their communities through print newsletters, in person meetings, and other offline means. These people thrive on being active locally. If you can somehow harness their knowledge, energy, and networks, you can create a vast forum of local influencers and relevant evergreen local content…
This, of course, is exactly what Front Porch Forum is all about in the 19 Vermont towns that comprise greater Burlington.
He goes one to say that no one has cracked this mystery at scale. Perhaps that’s the wrong way to look at it. Kind of like saying that none of the big box retailers have yet to really feel like a valuable local business. It could be that, when it comes to local, the internet will deliver on its promise of decentralization and small scale and we’ll see thousands of super-valuable local sites rising up, each unique to their own special community… not the one-size-fits-all big box approach emanating from Silicon Valley. Kind of like 100 years ago when every town had its own stand-alone, locally owned, daily newspaper.
Of course, the chains came along and gobbled up those papers eventually and left us with the USAToday model.
Maybe the internet will help usher back true local flavor and thousands of successful local media companies that enliven and enrich their home towns in ways that no clever distant mashup could ever achieve.
Mike Lanza and some friends have created something called Playborhood.com…
As parents of toddlers and babies, we’re concerned about whether we can provide a better life for our children than we had. We’ve certainly done well financially – better than our parents, by and large – so we can provide an abundance of material goods for our children. However, we weren’t hurting at all for material goods when we were kids, but we find that kids of today are sorely lacking in what was the greatest joy of our childhoods: free, unstructured play.
Free, unstructured play (or what we refer to as simply “play”) has virtually vanished from the lives of most children in America. We are committed to doing whatever we can to bring it back for our children and yours.
At Playborhood.com we will to build a community of parents in the United States, if not the world, that will become more aware of this problem, discuss solutions, and implement the best of those solutions.
This issue also motivates me in part to pursue Front Porch Forum. I commented on Mike’s piece here.
I’ve noted before that Smalltown.com is one of the few local online efforts that is working on a model that is both authentically local and scalable. Most local online efforts seem to fall either in the “one off” mom-and-pop side or the “local, as in WalMart is local because they have a store on the edge of your town.” Smalltown is aiming between these two extremes with early signs of success… good for them.
Today we hear from their blog…