Here’s a thought… “Local Online” efforts come in two flavors… those provided by locals vs. not. Local-local includes bloggers, local citizen journalism sites, neighborhood websites, community newspaper sites, and lots more. Outsider-local includes national offerings in yellow pages, mapping, search, classifieds, and a quickly growing number of offerings… peer reviews, database mashups, etc.
Both local-local and outsider-local bring value, of course, but outsider-local often lack authenticity. Some of that can be made up with large doses of user-generated content, but still…
Yelvington.com’s post today approaches this point today in discussing regional newspapers vs. those operating at the community level. In our area, the Gannett daily is now putting out suburban weeklies with recycled content from the past week’s regional paper. All the communities served by these new weeklies also have well-established community newspapers. There’s no confusing the two. One is local-local.
Certain national efforts, like craigslist, feel local-local in some locations, but not so much in others. Front Porch Forum is local-local in its pilot area. This suggests a litmus test for local online services. Which national efforts will be able to come across as local-local and thereby more authentic? Which one-city local sites will make the most of their homefield advantage as the heavyweights lumber into town… into every town?
Two of Burlington’s Neighborhood Planning Assemblies are now online…
All of the NPA Steering Committee members deserve thanks from the citizens of Burlington for the volunteer work they do on our behalf. About 25 of these good folks also participate on their neighborhood’s Front Porch Forum and have access to all of the neighborhood forums in their ward.
Kudos in particular to Basil Vansuch (Ward 5) and Lea Terhune (Wards 4 and 7) for creating these NPA blogs and thanks for mentioning Front Porch Forum on them.
“Neighborhood” seems to be heating up in the online world. Every week brings word of some new service aimed at the neighborhood level. Here’s the latest to come to my attention… Nayburz in Denver.
The site offers forums, classifieds, restaurant menus, etc. What seems different is the ability to define your geographic “bubble” on the fly across these different functions. This may prove an appealing approach for web-centric folks.
Congratulations to eNeighbors out of Colorado… nice press today mentioned on its blog. I’m not very familiar with this service… it appears to have some things in common with Front Porch Forum, but some significant differences too. Reminds me of i-Neighbors.
My sense of how they’re going at it from the article…
Congratulations to founders Phil Freund and Chris Stock.
I’ve been wanting to write about David Weinberger‘s Everything is Miscellaneous vis-a-vis Front Porch Forum since I had the pleasure of meeting him at a Berkman Center-Sunlight Foundation conference at Harvard earlier this year… so today’s the day.
The reason for my delay in writing is that I’ve been hoping to actually read the book(!), but it hasn’t happened yet. However I have digested enough reviews to be in receipt of the gist. From Amazon.com…
Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place–the physical world demanded it–but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous.
In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children’s teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by “going miscellaneous,” anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.
My take on David’s thesis is that trying to make one order out of “everything” is hopeless and not even especially useful. Better to tag everything and search anew every time you want to get at something. (Brings to mind huge filing projects in the pre-web days… I remember filling out cross-reference cards and placing them throughout the file cabinets… arghhhhh.)
So I’ve seen with Front Porch Forum. In our pilot city, more than 20% subscribe, each person belonging to their neighborhood’s forum. People post messages for their neighbors about babysitters, lost cats, restaurant reviews, plumber referrals, school tax debate, car break-in, moose sightings, school fundraiser, car for sale and on and on.
A few members have expressed frustration that all these messages aren’t neatly ordered into threads. Or that we don’t offer one part of the site focused on contractor reviews, another area on classified ads, another part for political debate.
Instead, each neighborhood forum publishes a single issue every few days with whatever postings the neighborhood has generated. Each message is clearly labeled. Current and past issues, a mishmash of subjects, may be browsed or searched by keyword, author, street, etc.
I don’t think caging this information into various compartments will serve anyone well. It’s all about the conversation… not order. FPF’s aim is to help neighbors connect and foster community within the neighborhood… not create a Dewey Decimal System at the neighborhood level.
Which brings me to much of web 2.0. Whether it’s real estate, reviews, classifieds, directions, discussion… whatever, many FPF members have reported that they would rather just search their neighborhood’s archive for what they need (and come across other interesting tidbits) or post a brief note to a couple hundred nearby households… rather that then go to one of the burgeoning number of these specialty sites.
Put another way, David argues that many web 2.0 sites free information and make it accessible in many ways. But these examples are still in verticals, such as real estate. So the information is constrained, although it’s accessible to everyone.
Front Porch Forum removes all subject constraint and instead limits who can participate… only residents of a given neighborhood.
For what it’s worth.
Just learned of Neighborrow.com. Seems focused on NYC apartment buildings. Neighbors join and offer to loan stuff to each other, and make requests. Website is up. Featured groups have a couple dozen or fewer members. It has a young feel (don’t borrow from anyone over 30?) and has some plumb media coverage… Grist article and MSNBC interview.
Our neighborhood has a manual version of this. Erik maintains a list of items people are willing to loan. I think he invited several neighbors into the group. Everyone gets the spreadsheet. Need an extra sleeping pad for this weekend’s camping trip? Check the list and make a call. Simple. However, not heavily used either.
This kind of thing seems to happen spontaneously through Front Porch Forum more… “hey, anyone out there have a sleeping pad we can borrow for this weekend?” That would likely get several responses from our nearby neighbors, who may or may not be on Erik’s list. Kind of “just in time” stuff-to-loan. And no database to keep up to date.
The Local Onliner reports today about GetVendors.com today…
Service referral sites like ServiceMagic and Angie’s List have gotten some traction. But by no means are they dominating the business. What will it take?
Ashish Mohole, co-founder of startup GetVendors.com, thinks the key is to guarantee that users get a wide assortment of choices when they make a query. Too many queries come up empty, or return just one or two possibilities, he says…
“Our approach is simple, honest and yet, effective and scalable,” says Mohole.
But most interesting to me was Mohole’s revealing assessment of the field circa mid-2007…
But Mohole also notes that the company’s prospects remain uncertain… Mohole openly wonders whether the time has passed whether startups like his can make a go of it. “All the big guns are pursuing everything possible to get in the local market,” he says. “The local space it is not easy for a start up to get traction in a short period of time without exposing to the risk of big players catching up.
In fact, he and his two other co-founders are contemplating selling the company. “A few years back, the experimentation would have been good idea with start ups making progress under the radar. But now it is more than likely these ideas will get ‘picked up’ and won’t have a chance to build premium value.”
As noted by Mike Boland and Peter Krasilovsky today, Yahoo! Local just rolled out its first redesign in two years with a focus on user-generated content. I know this is a big deal and involves huge sums of money, advertisers and visitors… but I’ve never had anyone tell me that they use this service… an arbitrary measure, but one that’s hard for me to shake. Peter K. compares it to an Oldsmobile… and I guess I’ve never had anyone crow about their Oldsmobile to me either… solid, always there.
Does GM still make Oldsmobiles?
UPDATE: Some more reviews of Yahoo! Local’s changes. First, eNeighbors does a good job sussing out Yahoo’s potential to get neighbors providing content to each other. Here’s someone echoing what we’ve been finding with Front Porch Forum.
And Greg Sterling weighs in… interesting comments to his post.
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