Much of Vermont is rural and therefore not uniformly well served by the bigshots of broadband, such as Verizon and Comcast. Peter Freyne interviewed the Speaker of the Vermont House, Gaye Symington today:
“It’s clear now, that waiting for the private sector to focus on Vermont and hook us all up to broadband is simply not a viable option.” The Speaker said the state should look at what the City of Burlington is currently doing – steadily proceeding to lay fiber to every door in the city (Burlington Telecom) providing broadband, telephone and cable TV service: “We’re dealing with something that’s on the scale of rural electrification. There’s going to have to be some creative thinking here that goes beyond just tax incentives and waiting around for the private sector.”
Also from The Local Onliner today, an interesting quote from an outgoing R.H. Donnelly executive, Simon Greenman:
Yellow Pages “[p]ublishers are well-positioned to become local search providers. But they’ll need to become much broader, with classifieds, promotional information and service directories. They’ll need to become more consumer-centric, with social networking, merchant recommendations and other features.”
I’m not sure how compelling all these features are when tacked onto a local search site. Front Porch Forum‘s approach is to build the most engaging local social networking service available, then integrate commercial features to add value for our members and pay the bills. That is, design the service for neighbors, and only treat these good people as consumers when and where it makes sense.
What are the most common categories for what people are looking for in (1) the Yellow Page and (2) local online search? Same things? Apparently not, according to The Local Onliner:
Just this week, Ask released the Top 10 food, music and business search lookups for its revised AskCity service. Here’s how AskCity’s Business Search compares to The Yellow Pages Association’s Top 300 categories:
1. Massage (#148)
2. Shopping mall (NA)
3. Hospitals (#9)
4. Family doctor (#2)
5. Churches (#22)
6. Plumber (#10)
7. Florist (#16)
8. Police department (NA)
9. General practice attorneys (#6)
10. Auto repair (#4)
The top ten Yellow Pages categories (from source above):
1. Restaurants (Fast Food & Nonspecific) 1,341 (millions of references)
2. Physician & Surgeons 1,173
3. Automobile Parts 567
4. Automobile Repair 449
5. Pizza 358
6. Attorneys 312
7. Automobile Dealers 28
8. Dentists 251
9. Hospitals 245
10. Plumber 244
Front Porch Forum doesn’t have enough data yet to be meaningful, but it will be interesting to see over time what our members are looking up in our message archives and via our sponsored links (forthcoming).
A story about Front Porch Forum will air tomorrow (Dec. 20, 2006) on Vermont Public Radio’s Morning Edition at 7:49 AM. That’s 107.9 FM around Burlington. We’ll have the audio version on our Media page after the fact. Thanks to Mitch Wertlieb and Ben Embry of VPR.
Side-by-side neighborhood photographs taken this year and in the 1930s provide great insight… each pair worth 2,000 words, I guess. Check out Depression Era Streetscapes, a project of University of Vermont Professor Thomas Visser. The site covers much of Burlington, Vermont, USA.
Mia Moran of Channel 5 News WPTZ captured the essence of what we’re after with Front Porch Forum in a piece broadcast last night. And bonus points to her and cameraman Nick for braving our home during the toddler bewitching hour. If you have trouble watching this video (on WPTZ’s site), hold tight… I hope to have a more accessible version directly on our server soon.
And in another take on related matters, Peter Krasilovsky reports on two more city sites: Pegasus News in Dallas and CitySquares in Boston. CitySquares co-founder Ben Saren reports 300 advertisers paying a flat 25 cents/click.
To date, neighborhoods out of the downtown district do best, like Jamaica Plain and Harvard Square. “There is a lot more of a neighborhood mentality,” says Saren The more homogenized, high rent businesses in downtown Boston are less likely to pitch their tent with a local city site.
Saren, like Pegasus’ Orren, hopes to take his concept beyond his city’s borders. “Ideally, it would be a Tier 2 or Tier 3 market with a college orientation, like a Burlington or Tallahassee,” he says.
Hmm… I wonder how this would work in home-sweet-home Burlington.
Nearly a quarter of private-sector, non-farm jobs in Vermont are in micro-enterprises, according to the Association for Enterprise Opportunity and reported by Leslie Wright in the Burlington Free Press today. The number of such businesses grew about 8% from 2001 to 2003.
A micro-enterprise employs fewer than five people and requires $35,000 or less in start-up capital.
I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with several small-scale local entrepreneurs whose business fits that definition. Many are excited about working with Front Porch Forum to connect with people in the neighborhoods that they serve. They often complain about being priced out of conventional means, such as the Yellow Pages. Plus, many of these folks are doing business with their neighbors, so they’re interested in supporting FPF as a community-building resource.
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