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.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.
Fascinating interview today by Mark Glaser with the leadership of Topix and how this online news aggregator is now focusing on local forums.
When local news aggregator Topix decided to set up online forums last December for every city and small town in America, they figured the forums would be a loss leader. After all, online forums have a bad reputation for unfettered discussion, gossip and slander, leading most news organizations to abandon them altogether online. And people on forums are usually more focused on the discussion than on clicking on ads.
But for Topix, the forums have transformed the site from a simple search engine and news aggregator into a series of online water cooler discussions that riff off the news of the day. And with the popularity of forums, Topix has a more engaged audience that stays on the site longer. Plus, Topix is bringing in even more money by serving up forums to newspaper partner sites and sharing ad revenues with them.
Neighboroo is a new Google map mashup with lots of data on housing, weather, schools, etc. Despite the name, the couple places I checked don’t really go to the neighborhood level… more like town level. Seems like an online version of “Places Rate Almanac”… which could prove useful if well executed.
Sorry to see that Backfence just shut down operations. From the Local Onliner…
BackFence announced June 29 that it shuttering its 13 community sites, which were in the DC area, Illinois and northern California. The ambitious site raised an initial round of $3 million, but never had high penetration in its communities, or sold enough Yellow Pages listings or banner ads to be optimistic about its future…
A visitor to this site pointed us to the Saguaro Seminar’s resource page today, which now lists Front Porch Forum among many other entities…
The following is a partial list of some interesting organizations that are about building social capital or harnessing it.
The Saguaro Seminar came out of Robert Putnam’s Bowling Alone and is based at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard…
The project focuses on expanding what we know about our levels of trust and community engagement and on developing strategies and efforts to increase this engagement.
Front Porch Forum is the “Featured Website” in the Summer 2007 issue of the Orton Scenarios E-Journal. Given how influential Orton is in such things… this is wonderful!
Also had a nice short piece in The Islander newspaper this week. Thanks Lorinda.
And this lovely quote came in today from a Vermont State Representative…
“I love Front Porch Forum. It is such a great way to be connected to different social networks and hear the opinions of my neighbors!”
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