Yearly Archives: 2007
Grayboxx ranks Burlington
Grayboxx has been generating some buzz online recently with its impending launch… which happened today. And lo and behold, its first target is our very own Burlington, Vermont. From its press release…
Grayboxx Inc., a Silicon Valley-based online local search firm, today announced that Burlington is the first city to gain access to the company’s unique “neighbor-recommended” local search service. By using patent-pending techniques to accurately determine the community popularity and approval for local businesses, grayboxx.com provides the most meaningful local recommendations on the Web. Grayboxx will roll out its service to other communities across the United States in the coming months.
For people who live outside of the largest metropolitan areas, there are few, if any, online local search options that provide extensive business rankings and recommendations. Grayboxx’s unique approach to local search has enabled it to assemble a critical mass of community feedback on more than 3,000 of Burlington’s businesses. The site features more than 12,000 “neighbor recommendations”, covering everything from antique shops to violin stores.
Wow! Burlington’s population is about 38,000… a little more than 12,000 households. Here’s how it works, according to the company…
Grayboxx’s innovative PreferenceScoring™ engine is able to translate everyday actions people take with or about businesses into meaningful expressions of business popularity and quality. For example, when a user checks out a restaurant online, makes a reservation, and then a week later makes another reservation, this can be considered as a positive recommendation of the restaurant.
Online reservations are just one of the many methods used by the powerful new local search engine to assess the top recommendations in Burlington. Grayboxx works by processing anonymous information from a variety of sources to create implicit neighbor recommendations in more than 6,000 yellow page categories in Burlington or in any city. This approach differs greatly from that of current search giants, which rely on manually entered user reviews for their recommendations.
This sounds interesting. Wisdom from boiling down databases… the final dish depends on the ingredients (data) and the chef’s technique (Grayboxx’s software). Let’s see how it tastes…
The following are samples of grayboxx’s top results for businesses and services in Burlington, as ranked by the Burlington community.
The top neighbor-recommended “jewelers” in Burlington are:
* Fremeau Jewelers, with 34 neighbor recommendations
* Von Bargen’s Jewelry, with 12 recommendations
* Hannoush Jewelers, with 3 recommendationsThe top three neighbor-recommended “taxi” services in Burlington are:
* Benway’s Taxi, with 38 neighbor recommendations
* Yellow Cab, with 8 recommendations
* Airport Taxi, with 5 recommendationsA search for “computer repair” in Burlington returns with the following:
* ReCycle North, with 47 neighbor recommendations
* Computer Rescue Squad, with 7 recommendations
* Pine Computers, with 4 recommendations
I just plugged in several other items… groceries, computer dealers, newspapers, shoes, pizza… maybe some of the databases they hope to mine are not quite ripe or fresh. As a local, I haven’t had one search produce what I would call “good advice from a neighbor.” Makes me wonder about the chef’s secret recipe (mysterious ranking criteria)… hard to trust when initial tests come up with what I’m seeing.
I know Grayboxx is taking aim at smaller markets, but this seems more suited for large anonymous metro areas. If I didn’t know anyone local to ask for a reliable and a reasonably priced taxi option, I’d be happy for this kind of service.
Burlington, and all of Vermont, is so reasonably scaled, that lots of this kind of information is near at hand. Ask a few co-workers, friends, etc. Indeed, this is one of the most common types of messages posted among neighbors on Front Porch Forum. People get real “neighbor recommendations” in Burlington everyday this way.
At this point, I’d rather ask a couple hundred neighbors for a computer repair recommendation through FPF than turn to this kind of service. Or I’d sooner take a peek at the local successful reader survey that our weekly alternative paper runs, the much coveted Daisies, by Seven Days. But Grayboxx may be more attractive than some of the other non-local data-driven behemoths stomping through the local online scenes these days. I’ll have to keep trying it… fun to have it here first.
And thanks to Greg Sterling for the lead.
Small Town Website Featured
Phyl Newbeck wrote an interesting piece for the Burlington Free Press on August 21, 2007 about a local online effort within Front Porch Forum‘s initial pilot area.
Jericho and Underhill collaborate in ways that few Vermont towns do.
They share a library district, a park district and a land trust. The two towns go even further in their collaboration by having a communal Web page and listserv known as “Two Towns Online.”
Although each town has a formal, municipal Web site, Two Towns Online provides additional interactive applications like collaborative document creation and a message board. Front Porch Forum offers three neighborhood-based listservs for Jericho and Underhill, but Two Towns Online founder Toby Brown feels that Two Towns Online is not redundant because it serves a larger audience and is the result of a group effort.
Two Towns On-Line wasn’t always a collaborative project. For almost a decade, Brown, a Web production manager and native of Jericho, was the sole force behind the page. That changed in 2005 when Jan DeVries, a retired businessman from Holland and newcomer to the town of Underhill, offered to provide additional applications such as Mediawiki.
Franco Gatti and Kelly King joined the duo, and the group formed a nonprofit organization and opened a dedicated bank account for the page. Gatti was born in Italy and moved to Jericho in 1994.
He retired from IBM with a desire to devote his time and energy to local projects and is responsible for the page’s virtual gallery for local artists and artisans. King is a home-schooling mother who is a lifetime resident of Jericho.
The Two Towns Online board is somewhat frustrated by the limited use that residents give the listserv. One hundred and thirty people are signed up, but conversation is limited. Still Brown is pleased with his efforts.
“It’s not a wild success, but it has become a community asset,” he said.
Brown sees the limited use as “reflective of our society where people aren’t tuned in to participating in the civil realm.”
The page may not be fully utilized as of yet but it is, as DeVries notes, most definitely designed in the Vermont tradition as it has no billboards and accepts no advertising.
Toby, Jan, Franco and Kelly deserve praise for all the work they’ve done… lots of good stuff on their site.
For the record, Front Porch Forum hosts four neighborhood forums covering 100% of Jericho and Underhill towns. To date, about 140 households have joined. None of these neighborhood forums are among our top tier in terms of member count or message traffic… but they are all getting there.
Social media + Classifieds
The Kelsey Group reported today…
LiveDeal announced that it will integrate community discussion boards to its classifieds engine.
Diversity and Community within Neighborhoods
Just found this article by Robert Putnam, PhD, of Bowling Alone fame.
E Pluribus Unum: Diversity and Community in the Twenty-first Century
Robert D. Putnam (2007)
The 2006 Johan Skytte Prize Lecture
Scandinavian Political Studies 30 (2), 137–174.
doi:10.1111/j.1467-9477.2007.00176.x
Volume 30 Issue 2 Page 137-174, June 2007Ethnic diversity is increasing in most advanced countries, driven mostly by sharp increases in immigration. In the long run immigration and diversity are likely to have important cultural, economic, fiscal, and developmental benefits. In the short run, however, immigration and ethnic diversity tend to reduce social solidarity and social capital. New evidence from the US suggests that in ethnically diverse neighbourhoods residents of all races tend to ‘hunker down’. Trust (even of one’s own race) is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friends fewer. In the long run, however, successful immigrant societies have overcome such fragmentation by creating new, cross-cutting forms of social solidarity and more encompassing identities. Illustrations of becoming comfortable with diversity are drawn from the US military, religious institutions, and earlier waves of American immigration.
social networking mom sites dime a dozen (or $5M for one)
Seems a new mom-focused social networking website pops up every week lately. I know Gannett has one in our area through it’s newspaper. And a grocery vertical I learned about recently is providing its client grocery store chains with just such a tool. I’ve heard good things in the past about the DC Moms Yahoo Group. Now today from Greg Sterling…
Mom-oriented social network CafeMom just received $5 million in funding and BabyCenter, which I just wrote about, relaunched the site with many more social media features.
Women and moms are are the intersection of a number of important online phenomena, including social media and commerce. They are the most influence and important audience when it comes to transactions.
Front Porch Forum‘s approach is to help mom’s in a neighborhood get to know one another so that they can then talk in person, form toddler playgroups, babysitting coops, etc. And plenty use their FPF neighborhood forum for direct “looking for a babysitter” or “stroller for sale” type postings. Since most mom sites are about connecting with strangers, why not do the same with a group in your own area? And actually get to know them… in (gasp!) person? And no need to limit it to just females… I love taking our little ones to the neighborhood playgroup.
Internet Marketing vs. E-Commerce
Greg Sterling today points out the following…
E-commerce is growing but it’s not the story. As I’ve argued in the past, the story is Internet-influenced offline/local sales. The Internet has emerged fundamentally as a marketing, rather than a transactions platform. E-commerce is a percentage of total US retail sales is less than 4%.
Local Online: Too Expensive or Not Interesting Enough
The Kelsey Group reports today…
Peter Horan, CEO of IAC Media & Advertising, gave a speech entitled, “What’s Local ReallyAbout?” He said that we are “now in the second decade of local: So much promise. So much logic. So little progress. How come?” His answer was that we are in the age of Internet-driven media where local isn’t about reading, it’s about doing.
Peter told the audience that the litmus test for local is usefulness, but he went on to describe the issue that has been facing city sites since they evolved from being mere bulletin boards hosted by a techie in a community. He called this the Grand Canyon of local – the trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness. Few media are able to bridge this gap. In order to keep costs down, city sites need self-service, low cost of sales and abundant promotional coverage at very low prices. But to meet the needs of consumers and advertisers, they require such high-expense items as a strong sales force, unique content and broad market coverage. Under Peter’s leadership, Citysearch is well on its way.
I read this to mean that few local websites have figured out how to continually crank out enough quality content to attract a sizable audience while keeping expenses in check.
Our early findings indicate that Front Porch Forum may well be an engine that can drive a local site. We have tremendous traffic (nearly 25% of our pilot city subscribe… word of mouth) and people love it. They go door-to-door to recruit their neighbors. The expense of moderating the neighborhood conversations is modest, but not the web 2.0 dream of zero… nor should it be. Plenty of other local online services could be hung on FPF as the core… it’s what people come back to weekly, even daily.
Professor Keith Hampton‘s research about neighborhood email lists seems to support this.
Online escape into virtual world vs. reintroduction into real local scene
Jason Fry, in reviewing FloorPlanner.com in the Wall Street Journal, concludes with…
The Net makes exploring the world and engaging with it easy in a way we’re only just getting used to. Within a few keystrokes, you can be digging into the news, indulging your curiosity, or foundering in an obsession or addiction. Practically speaking, you can communicate with most anyone you wish whenever you wish. And you can do so at a remove — step away from the PC, or just hit the back button, and your engagement ends.
That remove can be a wonderful thing. It lets us indulge our curiosity almost as quickly as we can think, makes it easy to drop a line to someone we might not feel like we have time to call on the phone and allows us to be part of a community that may be too diffuse for real-world interaction.
The danger is that interacting at a remove can come to seem preferable to the messiness of the real world, where a greater commitment is required and interaction demands more of ourselves than it does in our compartmentalized worlds of browsers and digital personas…
David Weinberger pointed out this passage in his blog posting today, and talks about the value of “what if-ing” via the web. My first thoughts go a different way… Some would argue that too many people are checking out of their local reality to spend time in virtual worlds online, television fantasy and the like. It’s one thing that makes Front Porch Forum such a different experience for people… FPF draws you into your local scene… people become more involved with the neighbors and community around them through the service.
Julia Lerman touched on this when she rates FPF vs. Facebook and the like from her global software development perspective.
Portals not so hot?
Jeff Jarvis takes the New York Times to task today for an article that suggests AOL’s struggles as an internet portal are a “quirk.”
Once and for all: The size of the site doesn’t matter to advertisers. Oh, yes, they still think its matters and for a time that’s still how they buy, by reflex. But get this straight: Just because a site has 100 million users, that doesn’t mean 100 million people see your ad. It’s not TV. Repeat: It’s not TV. The only people who will see your ad are the ones who see the page on which it appears. If you buy 10,000 impressions, aka eyeballs, you can buy them on a big site or a bunch of small sites, it doesn’t matter. Big brings no advantage other than convenience and it also brings some disadvantages like inefficiency and price. This is the essence of the change in the economic model of media. Post that on your wall and stare at it.
Local and Libraries
Municipal libraries are a cornerstone of local America. While they’ve been hit hard by budget cuts in many locales, they continue to play vital roles. So I was pleased to see Front Porch Forum treated well today by Charles at Dewey and Main.
Many small town librarians participate on the FPF neighborhood forums in their towns. They post announcements about programs and new books, as well as address specific issues that come up in the various neighborhoods. And, I would guess, they learn a bit about what’s going on around town and use that information to shape what they provide.
About Blog
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
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