Yearly Archives: 2008

Can the underdog win the vote?

Posted on Wednesday, March 26, 2008 by • 1 comment

Front Porch Forum is in tiny Vermont… we’re definitely the underdog in the Make It Your Own vote. But maybe we can pull off a miracle. We’re starting to hear from folks…

  • “Would like to vote and help you out–I think the fpf is the best thing since sliced bread–better even!” -Linda G.
  • “I want to thank you SO MUCH for the front porch forum. It has really helped bring us together.” -Sarah Jane W.
  • “… you’ve got my vote, we’ll pass it around to friends. Good luck.” Rich K.
  • “I just voted. It was an awesome experience to see FPF among other innovative national community programs!” -Nance N.
  • “i voted for you!  i’m actually a huge fan of front porch forum.  my neighborhood has a very active forum, and it’s my alternative to the local morning newspaper.  it was great to read the descriptions of the other wonderful community projects so that i could vote for three more.  it was hard to choose- they all sounded so good.”

Please help us continue and expand this work… vote today and spread the word!

Read/add comments.

Neighbors Support Each Other thru Front Porch Forum

Posted on Tuesday, March 25, 2008 by • 1 comment

People use Front Porch Forum in lovely ways. The other day a proud mother shared the following with her neighbors…

“We are pleased to tell the community that [our son], an eight-year member of Huntington Troop 645, passed his Board of Review last week and is now an Eagle Scout.”

She provided some detail and showed great constraint in not bragging… just sharing really.

Well… she opened the flood gates and neighbors started flowing in with compliments about the Eagle Scout, as well as a sibling and the parents in general, e.g.,

“This is a wonderful accomplishment and one well deserved. I agree that [they] have done a wonderful job giving these great boys to our community. It gives me much hope for our future to know that there are boys like these in our world and contributing to our future generations. The welcoming smiles that these boys so readily share makes my day each time I cross paths with one of them. Thank you, thank you, thank you!”

The mother weighed in one more time, a bit embarrassed, but clearly appreciative of her kids AND her neighbors.

It’s a privilege to have Front Porch Forum used in this way.

Please help us continue and expand this work… vote today and spread the word!

Read/add comments.

Craigslist bandits strip man’s home

Posted on Tuesday, March 25, 2008 by • No comments yet

Craigslist is a force of nature, an amazing thing. So is a tornado and a virtual funnel cloud hit Robert Salisbury in Oregon recently when someone posted a bogus ad on the local Craigslist saying he had suddenly moved away and everything on his property was free for the taking… even his horse.

As he drove toward his place he stopped multiple vehicles laden with his stuff and asked for it back… “no way” was the response. “Craigslist said it was free… end of discussion.” He’s working with the police and lawyers to sort through the aftermath now. As the Seattle Times reports…

Meanwhile, Salisbury could not even relax on his porch swing.

Someone took it.

This amazing tale illustrates one of many risks associated with using anonymous online services.

Front Porch Forum, on the other hand, is limited to conversation among clearly identified nearby neighbors.

Vote for us today!  And please spread the word about the Case Foundation funding contest.

Read/add comments.

Vote for Front Porch Forum!

Posted on Tuesday, March 25, 2008 by • No comments yet

Big news for Front Porch Forum and its thousands of local members…

The Case Foundation just named Front Porch Forum among the Top 20 (out of nearly 5,000 entrants) in its national Make It Your Own Awards. And today starts one month of online public voting to narrow the field to the Final Four, each of which will receive a $35,000 grant as seed capital.

Anyone from anywhere may vote. One email, one vote. Polls close April 22, 2008.

Please take two steps today…

  1. Vote for us.
  2. Ask others to vote. Please email everyone you know, use Facebook/MySpace/etc., blog about it, post in your newsletter… shout from the rooftops… whatever it takes. You can even embed the widget below…

These much needed funds will make a big difference in Front Porch Forum’s ultimate success. We’re an underdog since we hail from tiny Vermont, while most of the other finalists are based in major urban areas. But I like our odds. 😉

Add/read comments…

May we all be so fortunate…

Posted on Thursday, March 20, 2008 by • 2 comments

Here’s a posting from a South Burlington FPF neighborhood forum from Deana that makes my day…

I just wanted to show my gratitude for the neighbors I have on [our street].  People on our street care about one another, watch out for each other, and help whenever you need it.  I’ve walked out my door and my neighbor is chipping away at ice in my driveway for crying out loud!!

I’ve lived in southern Florida, San Diego, and now Vermont.  Making a life on [our street] has been an experience of a lifetime.  There’s nothing like it.

We are out of town right now and I feel very at ease as my neighbor, Susan, is taking care our dogs, the mail, and no doubt whatever weather inhabits our driveway.  I love turning off of [the main road] and immediately begin to wave at anyone who is in their yard or walking on the street.

Thank you to everyone on [our street] for making our neighborhood feel like a real community.  I am very proud to be part of it.

VBSR Panel to focus on Local Online

Posted on Thursday, March 20, 2008 by • 3 comments

I’m excited about a panel that I’ll be part of at the annual conference of Vermont Businesses for Social Responsibility. Here’s a draft of what to expect…

The World Wide Web Comes Home
How “Local Online” Is Changing Your Business

Richard Donnelly, Burlington Telecom
Christopher Grotke and Lise LePage, iBrattleboro.com
Chris Middings, Seventh Generation and Champlain College
Paula Routly, Seven Days
moderator: Michael Wood-Lewis, Front Porch Forum

The fifth great wave of the Internet—after communication, commerce, search and social networking—may well be “local.” People increasingly look online for answers to local questions about shoe stores, plumber recommendations, meeting people, directions, crime reports and more. A vast array of tools and services are being developed in Vermont to meet this demand. Much of this activity is fueled by online ad sales, which grew nationally to $20 billion in 2007. The Internet is driving business change, and companies are increasingly learning how to use this medium to focus on local markets. This session will provide attendees with concepts and tips for keeping up and getting ahead.

The conference (always a hit), will be held May 14 at Champlain College in Burlington, VT. The panel is tentatively scheduled for 1:15 to 2:30 PM. Come join the conversation… bring your experiences, questions and comments!

For a list of local businesses that have advertised online recently via Front Porch Forum, click on our sponsor link.

INVITATION: If anyone wants to get the conversation started early, leave a comment below…

Clift looking for small town UGC

Posted on Thursday, March 20, 2008 by • No comments yet

Steven Clift writes a good post today at PBS.org…

While the new EveryBlock.com site uses maps to display aggregated content for three major cities and Outside.in gets local with select geotagging blogs in a number of high population areas, I am looking for tools that display organic “user-generated” content via maps that get out of urban areas and into small town America.

As part of E-Democracy.Org’s Rural Voices project in Minnesota we seek to discover bloggers, social networking groups, wikis, online community forums, etc. from rural/Greater Minnesota. This map of 200 blogs aggregated by MNSpeak, shows just three outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area. This doesn’t seem very democratizing. Our goal is to connect these rural citizen media producers and bring them to workshops across the state.

Has anyone out there seen anything that combines say recent post data in Google Blog Search or Technorati and displays it as a daily/weekly/monthly “heat map” of sorts?

I’ve stumbled across a number of sites like Flickrvision and its cousin Twittervision which show real-time geo-tagged content. Panoramio shows photos from Google Earth. Placeopedia and WikiMapia are trying to get people to manually link place-based Wikipedia pages to maps. My friends with Placeblogger allow you to search by place, but I don’t want to type in village after village. The best site I’ve found that seems to get, is FindNearBy.Net which maps Craiglist and EBay sale items.

All in all, touristic rural areas do pretty well with photos online, but finding blogs/blog posts, video, wiki pages, online forums without highly focused geographic term searches seems near impossible. Can anyone help me out? Show me the map of my dreams.

Steven Clift
E-Democracy.Org

P.S. We are using the Del.icio.us tag mnvoices to tag Web 2.0 drive rural/Greater Minnesota sites that we find and will be adding the best sites we find to our wiki.

Gotta have my Front Porch Forum

Posted on Monday, March 17, 2008 by • No comments yet

We’ve been the lucky recipients of some great feedback about Front Porch Forum recently.  Just now a member wrote in after discovering that her new street address didn’t fall into one of our pre-existing neighborhood forums…

I just moved to Burlington and [my] street appears to not be part of a forum. I can’t imagine this is possible. If is is though how does one get started? I have been part of Westford’s forum and I love the information that is shared. I rely on it for local news, political info, resources, etc. and I will miss not having that in Burlington. I will look forward to you response. Thanks!

Good news for this subscriber… yes, her street does belong to a very active FPF neighborhood forum.  Our registration process just hiccuped and misdirected her… all’s well.

Local Business finds Clients through FPF

Posted on Thursday, March 13, 2008 by • No comments yet

Thanks to Elaine for this wonderful note today…

I just wanted to tell you that right after the announcement that I had started my business was posted on the Five Sisters Forum, I received an email from a prospective client. I’m happy to say that he is now an official client and I foresee a successful working relationship ahead. Many thanks to you and Front Porch Forum for making connections like these happen!
— Elaine Sopchak, Vermont Voices Marketing Services

I wonder how she’d do if she reached out across all 130 of our neighborhood forums in addition to the single one she tried the other day?

Yelp Expansion Plans

Posted on Thursday, March 13, 2008 by • No comments yet

Mike Boland writes today about Yelp, including…

The company is moving in some interesting directions and the $15 million it just received will provide the fuel. Much of it will be put towards sales & marketing to seed reviews activity and bring in SMB advertisers. Its 10 person sales office in New York City is the first such move and will be staffed with new and existing inside sales reps.

To clarify a point made in the last post, most of the company’s efforts to generate new reviews involve moving into new cites, rather than into new categories. Categories, according to Stoppleman, have to happen naturally and the company takes a hands off approach when it comes to the direction of the content. It’s geographical expansion plan also interestingly takes a stepping stone approach that branches out from existing cities and take advantage of the word of mouth and cross pollination of people between nearby cites like L.A., San Diego and San Francisco, in order to organically grow its branding and base of reviews.

Not trying to steer content makes sense.  As does the “stepping stones” expansion approach.

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

Search the Blog

Yearly Archives

Post Categories