Yearly Archives: 2009

Don’t feel like the b-word, danah

Posted on Sunday, September 13, 2009 by No comments yet

danah boyd’s post feels right on target… except for the “feeling like a bitch” part… fight the good fight, danah!

… I get hundreds of emails per day that I have to directly respond to. (Hundreds more get filtered into the “will read one day” folders that get very little attention.) I do a huge amount of my responding offline (on airplanes, public transit, cafes, etc.). Thus, messages with links take much longer to get my attention than messages without links. But there’s something nice about turning an INBOX into something manageable before people have the chance to respond. The problem with Web2.0 technologies is that each one wants to replace the INBOX (or at least be an additional channel). For example, there are private messages and comments on social network sites, direct messages and @replies on Twitter. There are blog comments. And RSS feeds. And then there are all of the online communities and bulletin boards and chat spaces that have evolved from those developed in olden days. For me, it’s too much. Too much I tell you. And we haven’t even gotten to voicemail, text messages. Let alone all that’s coming…

Read her whole post here.

Bringing public officials to the neighborhood level

Posted on Friday, September 11, 2009 by No comments yet

The local Gannett outlet published an opinion piece yesterday about Front Porch Forum and social media…

… the writer is unfortunately misinformed about the depth and effectiveness that has been reached in filling the gap between formal local government assemblies by the Front Porch Forum… The FPF creators chose to capture its audience at the neighborhood level because people already naturally choose to organize and deal with critical issues in their lives at this level. So, in a way, the FPF forces government officials to “come down” to the neighborhood level and speak more openly about what they intend…

Read the full column.

Methodical design of online communities

Posted on Monday, September 7, 2009 by No comments yet

Plenty of food for thought in this slide show from Joshua Porter (via Richard Millington)…

Craigslist a mess?

Posted on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 by No comments yet

An interesting take on Craigslist in Wired is now online.

Attention Surplus and Hyperlocal Advertising

Posted on Wednesday, August 26, 2009 by 1 comment

From marketing guru Seth Godin today

There was an attention drought for the longest time. Marketers paid a fortune for TV ads (and in fact, network ads sold out months in advance) because it was so difficult to find enough attention. Ads worked, so the more ads you bought, the more money you made, thus marketers took all they could get.

This attention shortage drove our economy.

The internet has done something wacky to this situation. It has created a surplus of attention. Ads go unsold. People are spending hours on YouTube or Twitter or Facebook or other sites and not spending their attention on ads, because the ads are either absent or not worth watching.

When people talk about the problem with free online, they’re missing the point. Free is creating lots of attention, but marketers haven’t gotten smart enough to do something profitable with that attention…

Big companies, non-profits and even candidates will discover hyperlocal, hyperspecialized, hyperrelevant… this is where we are going, and it turns out that this time, the media is way ahead of the marketers.

And many Front Porch Forum advertisers would agree.