Category Archives: Community Building
eBay vs. Garage Sales
The Local Onliner brought an interesting couple articles to my attention today by New York Times writer Jonathan Berr:
“I was reminded of what made eBay a success while I was reporting the story,” writes Berr, in a separate story picked up by AOL Finance. “First, it’s still a very affordable way for many small businesses who don’t want to spend the money on search advertising to sell their wares on the Internet. eBay also seems to be replacing garage sales as the means that people use to get rid of their junk.” [emphasis added]
I find this last bit troubling. I assert we need more garage sales, not less. Let’s compare on a few fronts:
Community building:
Garage sale… Talk to the blue-haired lady a few doors down about her antique lamp and what the neighborhood used to be like. Buy a watered-down Dixie cup of lemonade from the four-year-old who may be cutting your grass in another ten years. Talk with real people, face to face as you shop… “do you think I’d use this bread machine?” Find a deal.
eBay… Email distant strangers about Barry Bonds bobblehead dolls. Sit by yourself and decide you must have it.
Sustain our environment:
Garage sale… Walk up and down the street. Pull loot home in little red wagon.
eBay… Box up bobblehead, big delivery truck picks up item from sender’s house, trucks and jet aircraft ship across country, another big panel truck rumbles into the neighborhood and leaves cardboard and plastic-entombed doll at your doorstep. The way our society looks back in befuddlement at the Salem witch trials and wiping out millions of buffalo, and other past obvious atrocious behavior… that’s how our kids/grandkids will view behavior like this… “what were you thinking, Gramps?”
Keep your money in the neighborhood…
Garage sale… Your $20 goes to the guy who lives a couple blocks away. He then spends it at the corner store, etc.
eBay… Your $20 is split between the distant seller, eBay, Visa, UPS, Staples (for the box), etc. and leaves your community behind.
We should all put more thought into our personal dot.com practices and avoid uses that cause more harm in the long run than good. Thus ends today’s sermon. 😉
Sex and Romance Drives Craigslist
I’m often asked if Front Porch Forum isn’t an awful lot like craigslist Burlington. Besides the obvious Grand Canyon of a difference in scale and success (all hail craigslist!), I usually answer “no.” While it’s true that both are an online place to sell your used car among other things, they diverge from there.
And now we see some interesting analysis of how craigslist is used, or at least what drives most of its traffic… anonymous sex and romance postings. None of that on Front Porch Forum (how many readers just nixed FPF with that statement? 😉 ).
Stephen Bagg at Compete supplies the chart below:
He adds:
Compete reports just under 17 million people visiting per month… Analysis of eight major American cities shows erotic services consistently garners the highest number of individual visitors for February – almost always twice as many as the next ranking category, averaging 265,000 people per city. Equally racy lists that consistently score high visitor volume are the section for casual encounters as well as personals for women seeking men. The most commonly frequented venue outside of this virtual red-light district? Cars for sale.
Local news, business supplies for sale, real estate and web design are probably better off advertising somewhere else since they contribute less than a whisper to the overall site traffic.
Avoiding the social issues and political debates that fall beyond this brief glimpse behind the Craigslist curtain, perhaps it isn’t shocking that the search for romance is extremely popular in the online space. Offering anonymity, privacy, and little room for embarrassment, Craigslist is an ideal marketplace for those looking for those willing.
So, Front Porch Forum is in some significant sense the opposite of craigslist… no anonymity, out in the open within the neighborhood. Thanks to MediaVidea for highlighting the original information.
List of Neighborhood Online Resources
Steven Clift has some good insights into neighborhood community building via online tools at E-Democracy, including this list of existing neighborhood forums and resources. Lots of neighborhoods have self-organized online… websites, Yahoo Groups, blogs, etc. This hints at the hard-to-quantify demand for a more organized effort to provide this service, such as what Front Porch Forum is offering.
Urban Neighborhood Exodus still Lamented
Hey! That’s my auntie in the Washington Post this week. What a wonderful piece of writing from Georgia Lewis. Here’s a sample. Read it all here.
The year I was 13 my family moved from decaying, downtown Buffalo to a brand-new house in the suburbs. It was barely beyond the city limits, but it was a world away from what I’d known: street games, front porches and sidewalks; crowded flats with immigrant families and their assorted relatives; pungent odors of ethnic cooking; people sitting outside at night, sharing stories and troubles, teaching one another how to crochet or can tomatoes or speak English.
Our new neighbors were American-born, middle-class, polite but distant. They drove cars and sat on their private backyard patios. No front porches, no sidewalks, no visiting with neighbors as you walked to the corner store. No foreign accents and noisy extended families. These were the things we left behind.
I understood that our move was part of the American dream. But it wasn’t my dream. I didn’t want to move up. I missed the communal life…
I wasn’t the only one lamenting our success. My grandmother wept quietly for months. My mother phoned our old neighbors daily. My sister went back to the dilapidated old high school for her senior year. My father must have been bewildered.
Neighborhoods’ Impact on Kids
Kevin Harris writes about a new book today that sounds interesting…
I first heard Jacqueline Barnes talking about her research into families, parenting and neighbourhoods about three years ago and I couldn’t understand why the whole world didn’t know about it. I’ve referred to it a few times here (eg) and now it’s time to welcome the book – Down our way: the relevance of neighbourhoods for parenting and child development. It’s published by Wiley and also available via Amazon.
Small online groups = high participation
David Weinberger shares today:
A study by Communispace (which, as an online community developer has a horse in the race) says that while big communities necessarily have lots of “eyeballs,”
Results indicate that 86% of the people who log on to private, facilitated communities with 300 to 500 members made contributions: they posted comments, initiated dialogues, participated in chats, brainstormed ideas, shared photos, and more. Only 14% merely logged in to observe, or “lurk.”
By contrast, on public social networking Web sites, blogs, and message boards, this ratio is typically reversed, as the vast majority of site visitors do not contribute. In a typical online forum, for example, just 1% of site visitors contribute, and the other 99% lurk.
This supports what we’re finding with Front Porch Forum. Seven months into our homegrown effort, we’ve seen more than 4,000 local households subscribe to our free neighborhood forums (that’s nearly 20% of Burlington, VT).
Each neighborhood forum covers an area of a few hundred households. Of the 130 neighborhood forums that we’re hosting across the metro region, several dozen are really hopping. Because of the limited and small scale of these forum, among other design details, we see more than half of the members posting messages to their nearby neighbors. Compared to the wide open WWW (wild west web) people feel safe and engaged enough to comment… few lurkers. See past postings about scale.
More about the study from Online Media Daily:
The study, which analyzed participation behavior among 26,539 members of 66 private online communities, also found that consumers prefer fully transparent and branded communities to non-specific, non-branded ones.
“Everybody is talking about communities now, and so the question is no longer ‘should we have one?’, but more ‘what kind should it be?’ and ‘how can we design it to truly engage people and fulfill our objectives?'” said Communispace President and CEO Diane Hessan.
When potential members were considering whether to participate in a community, they were 30% more likely to log on when the welcome notice disclosed the company sponsoring the community. Branded sites had an initial log in rate of 71%, compared with 55% for unbranded sites.
In addition, of the 66 communities analyzed, parent communities, as a group, had the highest levels of participation. In general, the research found that the stronger the “social glue”–or common interests and passions among members–the greater the participation.
The research found that although members of women’s communities participated more frequently than men, men seemed to have more to say when they did participate: 4.8 weekly contributions for men compared to 4.1 for the women.
Notably, educational background and household income were not related to community member participation, as the passion around a community’s purpose appeared to be the main influence on participation.
More Kudos for Forum Members
Front Porch Forum received it’s second award of the week last Thursday when the City of Burlington recognized it with a Neighborhood Leadership Award. Wow! We might have to take down some toddler artwork to make room on the walls of FPF World Headquarters for the new hardware.
To the many well wishers… thank you for the congratulations. That said, it’s all a bit misplaced. You see, we didn’t write the 10,000 messages or personally recruit most of our now 4,200 subscribers. No… this is a group project in a big way. Front Porch Forum provides the foundation and ongoing support and it’s the members who breathe life into each neighborhood forum by getting folks on board and using it. So, to all FPF members: Print the two plaques shown here and stick them to your wall too.
Both award ceremonies last week were moving events. The City’s Neighborhood Night of Success, in particular, showcased dozens of people who find ways to make their communities wonderful places to live… old, young, rich, poor, all sorts.
Lauren Ober wrote a nice piece about Richard Kemp, longtime community activist, as he took home the Herb Bloomenthal Award.
Street-Level Local Online
There’s a new player in local online… at the street level. It’s called StreetAdvisor. Users log on by street address and then rate their street. There’s some social networking elements too. The company plans to advertise locally to get people to start supplying data.
My two cents: As with most local online efforts that depend on user input, the need for lots of active users seems to outweigh the degree of nifty-ness of the bells and whistles. This is a nifty site without users… so time will tell. It takes a different angle than anything else I’ve seen out there… which I value.
Front Porch Forum is all about getting users on board and engaged with each other first. We have more bells and whistles on the drawing board, but it’s the personal connection with neighbors and concern about neighborhood that drive our service. More than 4,000 households in our one test area signed on in our first six months… 15% of Burlington, Vermont… with zero marketing. People love it so much that they’re going door-to-door to recruit neighbors.
TechCrunch, WebWare and Mashable have blog entries about StreetAdvisor. Thanks to David Wilcox for encouraging me to take a second look at it.
Sure sign of spring in Vermont…
Winters in Vermont are long. When the snow finally starts its final retreat a collective sigh wafts over Burlington… followed by a “Oh sh#t! I just stepped in dog crap!”
I’ve been avoiding this topic (who wants to focus on dog poop?), but the sheer volume of dog poop posting the past week overwhelmed me. On neighborhood forum after neighborhood forum the call has gone out… “please scoop the poop!” All those layers of melting snow are revealing months of accumulated rogue deposits.
As unpleasant as it is to encounter this subject offline, reading neighbors’ online postings do provide a dose of antidote. It’s good to learn that I’m not alone in my aversion to this sign of spring.
The top two terms used, by the way, are the classic “dog poop” and the softer “dog poo.” I do take issue with the alternate spelling used by some folks on their forum… “dog pooh.” I’ll never think of Winnie in the same way.
And kudos to those like the following Front Porch Forum member…
“Enough talk. My shovel and 30 minutes cleaned up two buckets worth. Who’s next?” -South End resident
Amazingly, in all the poop postings, no one turned nasty. Most people, it seems, want to be and have good neighbors… regardless of the occasional mess.
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
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