Category Archives: Knight Foundation
EveryBlock Going Social
Congratulations to fellow Knight News Challenge winner EveryBlock on the rollout today of their impressively revamped web service. Per Mashable…
EveryBlock, a hyperlocal news site acquired by msnbc.com in August 2009, unveiled a new version Monday designed to encourage conversation and collaboration among neighbors.
“We’re shifting from a one-way newsfeed to more of a community-empowered website,” says EveryBlock founder Adrian Holovaty. “Instead of going to the site to passively consume information, we’re going to offer a platform for posting messages to your neighbors, to discover who lives near you.”
In addition to the neighborhood-specific news, business reviews, crime reports and real estate listings the site delivered previously, a slew of new features encourages users to share and discuss local news, meet one another and coordinate neighborhood activities. Users will be able to create profiles, post about events and other topics of interest, as well as find neighbors who “follow” the same places to connect with those with similar tastes. (Soon, Holovaty says, the site hopes to integrate Foursquare’s API, but for now it will show neighbors who follow the same places on EveryBlock.)
Adrian and his team are doing great work. He goes on to say…
“The web doesn’t yet offer an easy and effective way for people to post messages to their neighbors,” Holovaty explains. “Other social media tools are focused on people you already know — professional colleagues, friends, family. But how many people become Facebook friends with their neighbors?” he asks.
Front Porch Forum plays this role in our many Vermont pilot communities, and various blogs and e-lists do the same in hundreds of various neighborhoods across North America. The first proof of social media, of course, is adoption… do people use it? We’ll have to wait and see how EveryBlock fares on that front. The second proof — can they make it pay? — well, I imagine Everyblock has more breathing room with deep-pocketed MSNBC.com holding the purse strings.
UPDATE: This bit from the Nieman Journalism Lab includes several more write ups about EveryBlock’s news. The interview on Poynter is especially informative…
Holovaty answered a lot of questions about the redesign in a Poynter chat, saying that the site’s mission has changed from making people informed about their area as an end in itself to facilitating communication between neighbors in order to improve their communities. GigaOM’s Mathew Ingram applauded the shift in thinking, arguing that the main value in local news sites is in the people they connect, not in the data they collect. At 10,000 Words, Jessica Roy noted that the change was a signal that hyperlocal sites should focus not just on the online realm, but on fostering offline connections as well.
Email is dying? Better check your inbox
From eMarketer today…
The latest death knell for email was sounded by data in comScore’s “2010 U.S. Digital Year in Review” report, which noted a decline in time spent with web-based email among all US internet users under 55. Users ages 12 to 17, who have been most likely to drop email in favor of other online communications like social networking, had the steepest decline in usage, down 59%.
But web-based email checked at a desktop computer is only one slice of all email communications, and email represents an overwhelmingly important communications channel.
According to research from customer relationship marketing agency Merkle, 87% of internet users checked personal email daily in 2010, a number that has changed little since 2007. Among those with a separate email account for commercial email, 60% checked daily, down just 1 percentage point since 2008.
Further, social media usage is hardly taking away from email. Rather, social media users are significantly more likely than other internet users to check their email four or more times per day, and less likely to check infrequently…
I’m no expert, but it seems like it takes a loooong time for communication technologies to die. Radio, tv, newspapers, landlines, postal service, etc… all still with us in huge numbers… email too. Communication options are multiplying rapidly and the old stalwarts are not disappearing… shrinking in many cases… some would argue slimming down from eras of gluttony. This means lots of noise, lots of confusion, lots of splintering of audience. Businesses that can focus attention of groups of people and facilitate communication should be well positioned to provide value. Front Porch Forum is in the business of helping nearby neighbors connect and build community. We’re technology/channel agnostic, but we do know what attributes we like. More to come!
Be like the neighbors… then beat them…
Thanks to #BTV #VT ECHO‘s Molly Loomis for sharing this Washington Post article by David A. Fahrenthold…
To a psychologist, climate change looks as if it was designed to be ignored. It is a global problem, with no obvious villains and no one-step solutions, whose worst effects seem as if they’ll befall somebody else at some other time. In short, if someone set out to draw up a problem that people would not care about, one expert on human behavior said, it would look exactly like climate change…
One U.S. researcher thought television is to blame: All those TV ads have made Americans more focused on their own wants, she theorized, and less likely to care about the long-term good.
The obstacles to progress… there’s a sense that this is a problem for somebody else or some other time… the science can be confusing… humankind’s deep-seated love for the status quo and willingness to defend it… humans can fret about only so many things at once.
Psychological researchers say one possible way to overcome all these obstacles is to frame the changes needed to curb carbon emissions as “saving” the American way of life, instead of changing it. Another is to pair warnings about the climate with concrete suggestions about what to do, so people can act instead of just stewing in worry.
Another is to tap into two powerful human impulses: to be like one’s neighbors and then to beat them at something.
In one small study around San Diego in 2007, researchers hung four fliers on doorknobs. One told homeowners that they should conserve energy because it helped the environment. One said saving energy was socially responsible. One said that it saved money. The fourth said that the majority of neighbors in the community were doing it.
The researchers waited and then read the meters. The houses with the fourth flier showed the most change.
“Simply urging people — or telling them that it’s a good idea to recycle or conserve energy — is the same as nothing,” said Robert Cialdini, a professor at Arizona State University who worked on the study.
The best example of climate psychology in action might be programs run by the Arlington energy efficiency software company Opower. In 12 areas around the country, the firm sends mailings to utility customers. The sheets compare each customer’s power usage to that of neighbors with similar houses and offer tips for catching up, such as turning off lights and lowering the temperature settings of water heaters.
It works, the company says, lowering electricity usage by 2 percent in several test cases. The fliers never say a word about climate change.
Fascinating. Our experience with Front Porch Forum on a variety of topics jibes with this… that is, best pitch tends to be… join your neighbors vs. join because it’s good for you or your community or your wallet or the environment (all true by the way!). And getting the competitive juices flowing appeals to many.
Neighborhood Sites Can Awaken Community Involvement
[This posting originally appeared on PBS MediaShift/IdeaLab and Huffington Post.]
“When I was first on my own I used to bemoan that my fellow renters could hardly be bothered to return a wave but someone kept stealing my newspaper…,” wrote author Laura Grace Weldon in a recent blog post, What Makes A Street Into A Neighborhood? “Then we moved to a little house. It was silly how hard it was to meet the neighbors. They’d wave but that’s about it.”
Along the same lines, Sarah Byrnes wrote in YES! Magazine that “In the past, neighbors knew each other and engaged more naturally in mutual aid, sharing common resources and helping those in need. Nowadays, our mutual aid muscles are out of shape and pretty flabby.”
The National Conference on Citizenship’s Civic Health Index has attempted to bring science into the discussion by measuring things like the percent of people in a place who discuss politics with family and friends (44 percent in Vermont, for example). They found that 9 percent of Americans work with neighbors to improve the community, and 16 percent exchange favors with neighbors a few times a week.
Local Sites Drive Engagement
In their new book, The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John McKnight and Peter Block provide strategy and tactics culled from decades of community organizing. The book is chock full of hands-on, face-to-face ideas for pulling neighbors together. The Internet gets a mention, but it should get more.
A recent study from the U.K. by Hugh Flouch and Kevin Harris found incredible civic engagement impact from neighborhood-focused websites. Among the findings reported by residents who use these websites:
- 95 percent feel more informed about the neighborhood
- 92 percent feel useful information gets shared efficiently
- 82 percent feel people pull together to improve the neighborhood
- 69 percent feel an increased sense of belonging within the neighborhood
How is this possible? I’m guessing that the sites studied offer highly relevant (that is, very local) content, don’t waste people’s time, and emphasize relationships and communication among “participants” over simply feeding news to passive “readers.” These sites likely move away from social media’s 90:9:1 principal, which posits that 90 percent of visitors are lurkers, 9 percent pitch in a little, and 1 percent create the vast majority of a site’s content.
Sometimes even the 1 percent of the content that appears to be user-generated is actually supplied by paid contributors, such as the recent case with Yell.
Front Porch Forum
I see a different pattern with our Knight News Challenge-supported Front Porch Forum. We host a pilot regional network of online neighborhood forums in Vermont with the simple mission of helping neighbors connect and get involved.
In one rural town, we found that half of the community had subscribed to FPF after one year and, remarkably, 66 percent had posted. Instead of 90:9:1, we saw a ratio closer to 34:44:22. In another study in Burlington, Vt., where half of the city subscribes to FPF, 90 percent reported that their local civic engagement had increased due to this online service.
Finding quality, timely and accessible local information is a daunting task in our current environment, with traditional media’s convulsions and new media’s fits and starts. But that’s only half the battle. An informed yet isolated and disconnected populace does not make a democracy. We need more efforts like those covered in the U.K. study above that get people connected to neighbors and involved in the places where they live.
That’s our mission at Front Porch Forum and we’re excited to find growing interest in turning online words into offline local actions. Please share examples in the comments.
FPF available in 60 #VT towns
Don’t miss this Vermont-original community-building opportunity.
Another dozen Vermont towns can now benefit from Front Porch Forum thanks to e-Vermont, the Community Broadband Project, and the Knight News Challenge.
Front Porch Forum (FPF) was created in 2006 in Burlington and now more than 23,000 households subscribe across 60 Vermont towns.
If you live in one of the towns listed below, SIGN UP for your community Front Porch Forum today at: http://frontporchforum.com. Join in the conversations that are already happening in your community.
Also, please let friends and family in these Vermont towns know that Front Porch Forum is available, and encourage them to sign up! Only through more participation, will these towns realize the full community-building benefits of FPF. To sign up go to: http://frontporchforum.com
Why join Front Porch Forum?
FPF hosts online neighborhood/town forums where nearby neighbors connect and get involved in their local community. In this era of busyness and individual isolation, where it’s hard to find volunteers for local committees and people increasingly don’t know their neighbors, Front Porch Forum helps people meet those around them and talk about issues. And it’s free to residents in any of the Vermont communities below.
What if your town is not on the list?
Interested in bringing FPF to your community? Please add your town to the waitlist at http://frontporchforum.com/join
– Alburgh
– Arlington
– Averill
– Avery’s Gore
– Bloomfield
– Bolton
– Bridgewater*
– Brighton/Village of Island Pond
– Bristol
– Brunswick
– Buells Gore
– Burlington
– Calais*
– Cambridge
– Canaan/Village of Beecher Falls
– Castleton*
– Charlotte
– Colchester
– Dover*
– Essex Junction Village
– Essex Town
– Fairfield*
– Ferdinand
– Grand Isle
– Hardwick*
– Hinesburg
– Huntington
– Isle La Motte
– Jay*
– Jericho
– Lemington
– Lewis
– Ludlow
– Middlesex
– Middletown Springs*
– Milton
– Moretown*
– Morristown*
– Newport City
– North Hero
– Norton
– Poultney
– Pownal
– Richford*
– Richmond
– Sandgate
– Shelburne
– South Burlington
– South Hero
– St. George
– Starksboro
– Stewartstown, NH
– Sunderland
– Underhill
– Vergennes*
– Warner’s Grant
– Warren Gore
– West Rutland
– Westfield*
– Westford
– Williston
– Winooski
* e-Vermont communities newly participating in FPF
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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