Steve Outing offers his “lessons learned” on the just-dead Enthusiast Group (“experiment in grassroots media and social networking (as applied to niche sports)”). Here’s one of his lessons that caught my eye…
If citizen-content-exclusive destination sites don’t make sense when it comes to hyperlocal content, what else can you do with user-submitted content? Another approach is to focus on micro-targeting the citizen submissions. I’m intrigued by websites like YourStreet.com, which geo-tags local news and information and puts it on a map mash-up. Using a model like YourStreet’s, a news organization might create a map service that presents hyperlocal (geo-tagged) content on neighborhood maps.
While I live in Boulder, Colorado, I couldn’t care less about news from schools or community organizations serving neighborhoods across town. But I care a lot about anything to do with the school near my house that my daughter attends. I care about the announcement from the local fire station about staffing changes. So targeting that sort of news and information to me is a powerful service that a news company can provide. (Of course, I’d want the option to expand the range of micro-news and information that I view.)
If you can gather, slice and dice hyperlocal citizen news and information, think too about disseminating it outside of your own website. Create a customizable widget that a neighborhood blogger, say, can include on his site to offer his readers links to news and information pertinent to his neighborhood. That’ll drive traffic back to your website, or might include ads that you place within the widget. Win-win.
If a news website can filter the minutiae (from a wide variety of sources, internal and external to the news organization) that’s relevant to a specific online user, and present that in context with the professionally produced output of the news organization, then I think you’ve got something valuable.
Cameron Ferroni of Marchex wrote today about the special place Craigslist holds for him…
… it really boils down to the fact that the simplicity of the experience and the personal nature of the interactions make this stand head and shoulder above any other online service of its type. For those of us in the industry we would do well to take this to heart – and maybe, just maybe, spend less time worried about our slick UI, our SEO strategies, and our mapping technology, and spend more time worried about the specific value proposition for users.
Some of our members compare Front Porch Forum to Craigslist along these points… simple and extremely effective on a few fronts… period. We get lots of interesting suggestions for new features and we’ve implemented some and will add others over time… but I’m excited to stay true to our initial premise of “simple and effective.”
Maps are important to neighborhood level online social networking. From an announcement received today…
Placebase, Inc., the makers of the Pushpin online mapping platform, today announced a partnership with Urban Mapping Inc. (UMI), the leading provider of enhanced of local interactive content. As part of this agreement, Urban Mapping’s neighborhood boundary database will be available on the Pushpin platform. A demonstration site is available at: http://www.pushpin.com/urbanmapping…
This is similar to what the good folks at Maponics provide I believe.
Also, from Google Maps today… people can now drag address markers for businesses and houses to a more precise location. So Google is asking its millions of users to do the honing in that it can’t currently do through brute force. Seems like a good move.
I wonder how many addresses we have in the United States? We have about 300 million people and 2.5 or so people/household… so about 120 million households (some of those in multi-unit buildings) plus businesses, institutions, etc. I wonder what percentage of these millions of buildings could have their location refined via Google’s registered users?
And a wish… that the Google Maps API used better data… or, perish the thought, that is used the same data as Google Maps.
Marchex is working on a new network of neighborhood blogs called MyZip. If I read the description correctly, they posit that the $50/month paid to a blogger in their network will provide sufficient incentive to keep up a five-post/week pace indefinitely… that’s about $2.30/posting. Hmm… could be interesting.
I would neither blog about or read regularly someone’s daily blog about my neighborhood… and the $2.30/post payment somehow makes it even less likely. What I want… to hear from and interact constructively with lots of my neighbors. That’s our aim with Front Porch Forum.
Time will tell. Lots of room for new ideas. Marchex doesn’t have the MyZip site up yet.
Front Porch Forum is asked frequently to offer a social networking services for local nonprofits and other groups. Looks like Change.org may be able to help these good folks now (from TechCrunch)…
Change.org uses social networking to help social causes. For the launch, they’ve already partnered with 50 non-profits, like CARE, Greenpeace, and Amnesty International. Any other non-profit can launch their own network as well, as long as you have a government approved tax ID number.
They have modules for all an organization’s main needs: events, fund raising, forums, blogs, members, and posting photos/video. I really like how Change.org is evolving overall. The site is about connecting people passionate about a particular cause and not engaging in a shouting match or symbolic gestures of online support.
Other useful services for non-profit work include Wild Apricot, Idealist.org, Tree Nation, and Kevin Bacon’s Six Degrees.
TechCruch reports today that FatDoor.com just landed $5.5M of funding and a new CEO from Yahoo…
Fatdoor aims to connect you with your neighbors by providing a localized social network for your physical community. Although the site will be in private beta until the spring of 2008, a handful of details have been publicly available since at least June. The website will integrate with Microsoft Virtual Earth to display local business and residential listings on an interactive map. Once users claim their listings, they can add profiles and put down their interests. Users can then plan events and form local interest groups with the site.Fatdoor will also pull in information from other web services such as business reviews from Yelp, events listings, and driving directions. Users will be able to add their own business reviews but they won’t be displayed outside of the network on Yelp’s website. Fatdoor’s homepage will display something akin to the Facebook news feed with information about upcoming events and recently created groups.
So my FatDoor scorecard reads… great space with huge potential, new CEO with impressive credentials, money to burn… this could prove interesting. Or not… time will tell.
Most Silicon Valley successes are made by roping in some small percentage of the population over a huge geographical expanse… e.g., 5% of the United States on board some website would be 15 million people… yipee.
But to succeed at the local or neighborhood level, you need a relatively large percent of the population in a small area (e.g., our Front Porch Forum has 25% of our pilot city registered, but Burlington, VT only contains a fraction of 1% of the U.S. population). This is a very different game and one that most mainstream dot.coms and start-ups aren’t pursuing well or at all… thus the opportunity.
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