Category Archives: Local Online
What if 90% of people blogged?
Cathy Resmer writes about a couple failed local citizen journalism sites today, the Winooski Eagle and…
iBurlington — “Burlington Vermont’s Blog” — a local citizen journalism site, launched in 2005.
Creator Brian Brown had high hopes for the project, which he modeled after the successful CJ community iBrattleboro. In March of 2005, Brown told Seven Days he expected to sign up more contributors and get more traffic than iBrat, if only because Burlington’s a bigger city.
But it didn’t happen that way.
She adds…
Front Porch Forum founder Michael Wood-Lewis was also at the [local bloggers] BBQ. FPF is a neighborhood email newsletter, not really a web-based tool, but it’s definitely succeeding in some respects where iBurlington failed. That just occurred to me as I was writing this post, and it’s definitely something to think about.
Thanks Cathy. I agree. Front Porch Forum seems to defy pigeon-holing… it’s not a blog, not a wiki, not a mail list… what is it?!?! I guess we should come up with some technical term for FPF… but it’s really just something new and different… and successful. While email is our primary distribution method currently, that’s not really what FPF is about… just a vehicle we’re using now.
In a way, FPF is hosting 130 group-written blogs, each focused on a neighborhood and written by a host of contributors/neighbors. Our most active neighborhood forums have 90% of the households on board.
Blogs are small, independent, decentralized, self-appointed, low-capital, etc, compared to traditional media. Well, FPF takes it another step, giving the masses an online platform to share their thoughts and needs with their neighbors through its neighborhood forums. So while starting a blog is much easier to do than starting a newspaper, it’s still not doable for many, if not most, of the population. On the other hand, anyone who can handle email can participate in Front Porch Forum and add their voice to the online conversation.
Jitter Fingers takes aim at Girls
The Local Onliner reports today about…
Jitter Fingers, a social network for teen and “tween” girls looking for a secure and focused environment (i.e. away from the predators that lurk in MySpace), has launched a local beta version in Los Angeles. It expects to eventually launch up to 300 localized versions.
Founder Allen Esrock, a longtime tech headhunter – and the father of two girls in the targeted demo — notes that girls “place their friendships above anything else. Within their private (and verified) ‘Jitter Friends’ club, girlfriends can chat, share secrets, horoscopes and photos….leave messages for each other.“
Local is a huge part of Jitter Fingers’ equation. [And] “Our ability to push hot national content such as celebrities, movies, and fashion into the girls’ locally created marketplaces creates a female national/local advertising platform,” says Esrock.
Esrock adds that the website is “the first plank” in a cross platform product that will leverage multiple revenue streams from marketers who eager to reach targeted, local girls.
Well, I’m all for creating safe places for kids (of whatever gender) to socialize online (or maybe not, come to think of it). But it seems that this site wants to block one type of predator so that they can sell access to another type of predator… “marketers who [are] eager to reach targeted, local girls.” Call me old fashioned, but my daughter will not be using this service.
Krillion Traffic… and FPF’s
The Local Onliner reports today…
Krillion, the retail search engine optimizer whose motto is “find national brands, locally,” is now getting 65,000 unique visitors per month and over 200,000 page views to its appliances, the first of many planned verticals. A second vertical, still unannounced, is currently being readied for release.
There’s more news about where Krillion is headed, but its traffic data caught my eye. Front Porch Forum‘s web traffic is the same order of magnitude and growing steadily. And, FPF is only focused on one small metro-area right now. And, the bulk of our service is email… our website gets a fraction of our total online traffic.
Topix Forum Posting Pattern
Digging a little deeper into the MediaShift piece about Topix providing small town forums…
We found that in most places in this country, we are the only high-end news site. What happens is this odd pattern where a news event happens, and they find our site online and they like it and stick. One of the more dramatic cases was when two tornadoes struck Caruthersville, Mo. Up to that point, we had a little activity there but it was pretty low. That day we had 600 posts about the tornadoes
, and it was astonishing, there were first-hand accounts and people were asking if so-and-so was OK. People in the town were responding and saying, ‘yes, they’re OK.’ A few months later, a lot of the people had stayed in the forums.
There’s a lot of local gossip and chit-chat. Will it pass a test for being journalism or not? Well, a lot of important issues would pop up, like about the police chief or a sex scandal at the high school. The traffic is sustained by the gossip and chat, but from time to time, they want to talk about important civic issues, and because we’re the only site that offers that, this is where they do it.
Tolles: If you look at the curve of posts [click graphic on left], you had this initial burst of posts with the tornadoes, and then the daily chatter in the forums. But somewhere along the line, there was this unpopular police chief and government, and now the post volume is higher than it was during the spike around the tornadoes. It’s got to the point where I sent a person from my staff out there and he’s videotaping the town, making a mini-documentary, and everyone there knows Topix. People in this little town know us.
This posting pattern is similar to what we’re seeing in Front Porch Forum‘s various neighborhood forums. Low level chatter as people join and it slowly builds. However, in a neighborhood with a galvanizing event (unwanted big box store, crime wave, etc.), we seek a spike. Post spike, however, the plateau is raised. Then, the second big issue (that is, in the neighborhoods that have had two big issues so far), message traffic gets big and stays there.
Yelvington on Backfence and Front Porch
Steve Yelvington writes about Backfence‘s recent closure…
We still don’t know the right scale for doing this sort of thing, and that scale may actually be shifting as more people sign up for cheap broadband and become comfortable with creating and not just consuming content. Backfence cofounder Mark Potts once speculated in a conversation that the right physical community size is under 50,000. We’ve had great debates about that where I work; one point of view says a local high school district can serve as a useful proxy for defining a natural community, but your mileage may vary.
People settle into community levels… think concentric circles. Maybe 150 friends in the inner circle. More like 2,000 in the neighborhood… the elementary school district. Maybe 50,000 is the next hop… the high school level. And so on. Capital wants to centralize and standardize across as many people as possible… think USAToday. People tend toward decentralization and diversity… think distinct neighborhoods or yore with their own corner stores, clubs, ethnic flavors, etc. Front Porch Forum is designed for the neighborhood level.
A successful community model and a successful business model are not the same thing. The tricky part is going to involve finding the intersection. Something like Front Porch Forum might have a great community model but never be able to make a significant profit, or vice versa. Or the right business model might involve delivery of a print component, something many Web-centric developers might overlook or avoid.
With 20% of our pilot city subscribing in our first half-year via word-of-mouth, I remain optimistic about FPF’s evolving business model. Time will tell!
Everybody underestimates how hard and how expensive it is to build a powerful brand at a geographic community level. If you went down the street in one of Backfence’s markets and knocked on doors, how many people would have a strong, clear, positive notion of what Backfence was all about and why they should use it? This is one place where incumbent, offline media may have a great advantage, although in many cases it can’t deliver the message to the targets of greatest opportunity (nonconsumers).
Good point.
Neighborhood Mapping Tool
Glenn reports on AnyGeo today…
Maponics, LLC announced today the full release of Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries™. Until now, websites offering local search, including social marketing, real estate and Web 2.0 sites, have had to provide search results based upon ZIP Code or city name. By integrating Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries, search results for hundreds of cities can now be filtered and even mapped by universally accepted city neighborhood boundaries. The result – more relevant local search results, more loyal site visitors and higher ad revenue. More about the dataset… Covering hundreds of the top US cities, the Maponics Neighborhood Boundaries database includes all latitude and longitude coordinates for each neighborhood polygon. It is specifically designed for easy integration into Google™, Yahoo!®, or Microsoft® map mash-ups or into back-end data analysis applications.
The idea of mapping by neighborhood is a very clever one and I believe offers amazing opportunities to the users of these data. Given the social and economic characteristics that residents of a “neighborhood” share this could indeed truly become a very powerful and useful data product… I can’t wait to see where this goes as we see apps developed based on neighborhood data. See www.maponics.com
Front Porch Forum has created polygons for neighborhood boundaries in our pilot area (Burlington, VT) and it’s more art than science. Some are obvious to everyone, other areas defy consensus.
Zillow launches neighborhood pages
Zillow.com, a big real estate site, today launched its new Neighborhood Pages…
We’ve created more than 6,500 new Neighborhood Pages in 134 cities across the country (with more to come). We’ve seeded these pages with some pretty amazing demographic data—including telling characteristics about the residents of these neighborhoods. However, the bulk of the content on the Neighborhood Pages we have left up to you, the Zillow community. Use the neighborhood discussion forums to meet your neighbors, talk about local news, publicize events like garage sales and get the inside scoop by asking questions of residents who know the area best. You can also share your photos of the neighborhood and check out the real estate in your area – from homes for sale to local Make Me Move prices to the most talked-about homes. To find a Neighborhood Page, you can access via any one of the 70+ million Home Detail pages and look for the link right beneath the address.
Bloggers tracking this kind of thing question whether people will come and populate the site with their postings. Time will tell. From The Real Estate Bloggers…
Now the problem with all forums or microsites that require user input to thrive is gaining that critical mass. There is no way Zillow is going to be able to staff people to manage each locales page without throwing big money at it. And Topix has the automated local news side of hyperlocal figured out and they are muddling along.
What will determine the critical mass is if enough people will come and stay to discuss local issues on a regular basis. Some real estate agents will, but to be honest I am not sure that homebuyers want to sit around and watch real estate agents talk shop. And for the real estate agents to come to Zillow and change their voice so what they write is a big leap, if they wanted to do that they would have a blog and be dominating the local SERPs that way.
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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