Ahmed Farooq writes an interesting piece today about not taking investment money for his local review site called iBegin Source. He says, in part,…
When we had originally launched iBegin, I think about a dozen VCs came to us in the first 3 months or so. They all liked the idea of local social search, and wanted to expand on it. Quickly. Yelp was gaining steam, and with Judy’s Book and InsiderPages all growing too, they were convinced that untold amounts of money was to be made.
Thankfully, I had a philosophy, and I stuck with it.
And it became clear relatively quickly that the sales channel and the review channel did not mesh very well. A vice-versa catch-22 – if a business had good reviews, why bother advertising? If a business had bad reviews, why bother advertising?
By not funding and deciding to take my time, I was able to re-assess without having fire being breathed down my neck. Heck I even went on a one week vacation to clear my head.
I look forward to reading Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. Until then, this video of his lecture at Harvard’s Berkman Center provided me a thought-provoking overview.
The nut… the internet allows for “ridiculously easy group forming,” which improves…
But this doesn’t do his ideas justice. I’m especially interested in how much of Front Porch Forum‘s experience maps onto Shirky’s conceptual framework. Many of our online neighborhood forums, upon reflection, have followed the four steps above.
UPDATE: See comments below.
Several compelling bits from J.D. Lasica’s posting at PBS.org/MediaShift/IdeaLab today…
As newspaper analyst Dave Morgan observed last year: “Ad revenue in most large newspaper markets will keep dropping 3-5% per year for the next five years. Real circulation — excluding the tons of papers dumped on schools, hotels and the constantly-churning “free ten-week trial” — will keep dropping 3-7% per year for the next five years.”
And…
On Friday, Beatblogging.org’s David Cohn pointed to Clay Shirky’s new book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, and quoted this excerpt from Shirky’s book:
A good deal of user-generated content isn’t actually “content” at all, at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience. Instead, a lot of it is just part of a conversation.Mainstream media has often missed this, because they are used to thinking of any group of people as an audience. Audience, though, is just one pattern a group can exist in; another is community. Most amateur media unfolds in a community setting, and a community isn’t just a small audience; it has a social density, a pattern of users talking to one another, that audiences lack. An audience isn’t just a big community either; it’s more anonymous, with many fewer ties between users. Now, though, the technological distinction between media made for an audience and media made for a community is evaporating; instead of having one kind of media come in through the TV and another kind come in through the phone, it all comes in over the internet.
University of Florida new media professor Mindy McAdams chimed in:
Newspapers used to be centered in communities. Now they are mostly not. People in much of North America don’t even live in communities.Is this why newspapers are dying? Because there are no communities? …
It’s about what Shirky said: Audiences are not the same as communities, and communities are made up of people talking to one another.
What does a community need? How should journalists supply what communities need? …
This is what Front Porch Forum is all about… helping nearby neighbors stitch together community at the neighborhood level… in every neighborhood in a region. And, as Professor McAdams said above “People in much of North America don’t even live in communities.” And many want to.
I’ve always been fascinated by grand old mansions in various U.S. cities that have fallen on hard times… whole neighborhoods that, over a couple generations, go from being the toniest side of town to the slum. And solid middle class homes too. How temporary it all is.
So Christopher B. Leinberger‘s current Atlantic article, “The Next Slum?” easily caught my attention…
Strange days are upon the residents of many a suburban cul-de-sac. Once-tidy yards have become overgrown, as the houses they front have gone vacant. Signs of physical and social disorder are spreading…
In the Franklin Reserve neighborhood of Elk Grove, California, south of Sacramento… many [of the houses] once sold for well over $500,000. At the height of the boom, 10,000 new homes were built there in just four years. Now many are empty; renters of dubious character occupy others. Graffiti, broken windows, and other markers of decay have multiplied. Susan McDonald, president of the local residents’ association and an executive at a local bank, told the Associated Press, “There’s been gang activity. Things have really been changing, the last few years.”
He lays out how the subprime mortgage mess, the increasing demand for urban living and resulting gentrification, and the inefficient design of suburban living will combine to vacuum the upper and middle class out of many suburbs, leading she ‘burbs toward chopped up rental housing, poor schools, etc. Over time, the suburbs will see similar decline to what our inner cities did in the 1960s and 70s.
In thinking about the thousands of neighborhoods that turned over or were emptied out due to “white flight” and wholesale demolition (a.k.a. “urban renewal”), I wonder about the people, the community, the relationships… so much lost. A much quicker version of this occurred in New Orleans with Katrina’s deadly arrival.
Well… I recommend the Atlantic article.
A couple pieces today make the case that well-to-do neighborhoods have a reduced sense of community vis-a-vis more middle-class and low-income neighborhoods. True?
From a Wall Street Journal blog (see the comments)…
I’m always amazed at how the richest neighborhoods are also among the most empty.
And from Playborhood…
The fact is that, overall, the owners of these 2+ million dollar homes are not very “neighborly,” at least when they’re compared to owners in other neighborhoods with much less expensive homes.
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