Congratulations to Seven Days‘ Cathy Resmer for the national award she just won for her work online. Details here.
Dan Gillmor wrote recently…
Jason Calacanis, who calls his new venture Mahalo “human-powered search,” says the company will pay freelance searchers a fee for links the site accepts. He says he hopes for hundreds or thousands of people in this part-time capacity.
Some similarity to Front Porch Forum in that our subscribers put all sorts of search questions to their neighbors through our service… looking for a roofer, seeking replacement storm windows, babysitter needed, who to talk to about potholes, etc.
Instead of pay, the motivation for members to respond to requests for information is based on their desire to connect with neighbors and build community within their neighborhood. That is, answer a question and get a little healthier community to live in in return.
More valuable information via The Local Onliner…
My former colleagues at Borrell Associates have carved out a unique role in the local online advertising space with their annual survey of local media revenues. This year is the survey’s fifth, and was conducted with 2,885 properties in the U.S and Canada.
What Borrell found was cumulative local online revenues of $7.5 billion, with 31.6 percent growth (compared to 20.7 percent for national online advertising). Within the local ecosystem, newspapers account for 35.9 percent– which is impressive, but down, percentage wise, by several points. Pure play Internet companies have 33.2 percent, and Yellow Pages have 11.7 percent. Other local revenues come from “Other Print,” including Shoppers and other local magazines, which have 9.2 percent; TV stations, which have 7.7 percent; and radio stations, which have 2.2 percent.
Dedicated, online-only sales people were up 26 percent in 2006, and Borrell sees budgets for an additional 35 percent in 2007. “Some of the largest local sites are now employing two dozen or more online-only salespeople as they migrate from the up-sell model and begin to fully embrace Web-only sales,” says Borrell. “The median gross revenue per online-only salesperson was $278,570; the largest sites were seeing triple that rate.”
The Local Onliner reported recently…
WashingtonPost.com has soft-launched “Local Explorer, ” which allows users to map crime, home sales and school information by zip code. It is a great model for “mapped journalism.”
WashingtonPost.com, in fact, has really ramped up its hyperlocal activities. In addition to the Local Explorer, it has Express, its Oodle-powered crawl of local classifieds; its new City Guide; and its “On Being” video series of local people. The Post is also beefing up its exurban coverage –soon — by launching Loudonextra.com, per Paul Farhi in The American Journalism Review. The Post seems to have been caught shorthanded by Loudon’s extremely fast growth, and has a news staff of just four people for its twice weekly Loudon supplement… Just last year, BackFence signed to power the website for The Loudon Independent, a new startup paper in the County. Per Farhi, Loudon now has 11 weekly newspapers.
Farhi’s AJR article… is a general overview of hyperlocal… It notes, for instance, that BaristaNet.com, the compelling hyperlocal site serving Essex County, NJ, is on target to make about $100,000 this year, up from $60,000 in 2006.
It was a pleasure meeting Craig Newmark last month at the Personal Democracy Forum. Mark Evans shares the following about Craigslist…
Curious about Craigslist’s success? Then check out this podcast that founder Craig Newmark did with David Weinberger. Quote of the podcast from Newmark: “Everything on the site is based on user feedback. Frankly, I have no vision whatsoever.” At the mesh conference last week, Craigslist CEO Jim Buckmaster dropped a few mind-blowing facts:
1. The site is serving up seven billion pageviews a month from 200 servers
2. All 24 employees work at a Victorian house in San Francisco
3. The company has never had a tech quit in 12 years
4. Craigslist never holds meetings.
Front Porch Forum received a wonderful compliment from someone who knows about such things when he compared FPF to MeetUp.com. And then today Dave Weinberger wrote…
I’m glad to say that MeetUp.com is doing well, growing 10% per month. (Their only metric is how many successful meetups there are.) I love the Web, but I love faces more than screens. Also, I’m an admirer of MeetUp because it was founded to address a real social need. They are, well, good folk.
Mark Glaser’s interview with Lisa Williams of H2otown and Placeblogger is worth reading in its entirety. Here’s a clip…
If you ask why people read the newspaper they might say, ‘to be informed.’ But to be informed for what? I think the answer is to be informed to connect with other people. But those places to connect have shrunk. No one joins the Elks Club, they don’t have time to go to meetings. My neighborhood in the wintertime, I saw people going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark. It’s not that they didn’t want to have those conversations anymore, it’s just that they didn’t have [a way to] fit those into their lives. H2otown is low impact and it allows people to have those conversations at the times that they can do it. That’s why this kind of community could be important to newspapers. It provides the civic conversations.
This reminds me of one aspect of Front Porch Forum… people say that it replaces the neighborhood grapevine that use to exist when neighborhoods were full of people during the day (“housewives,” toddlers, milkmen, etc.).
What about the franchise idea like Backfence, taking one model and replicating it for other communities? Do you think that’s possible or that each community needs its own independent way of looking at it?
Williams: There’s a bigger problem here. It’s very hard to make sites with user-contributed content work. And by work I mean have enough fresh content on a daily basis to attract more participants. Even if you have the content of a newspaper, and you combine that plus volunteer content, and you try to get that down to a local level, it’s still not cooking. Whether it’s Backfence or whether it’s a newspaper or some other thing, being interested in aggregation is really important. Because there are already so many people writing about places online, so it’s not that wise to expect people to find your site and volunteer their time to write for it.
You have to have a three-legged stool if you’re a newspaper: content from the newspaper, content contributed to the site, and content that other people are writing about that topic already online that you have an automated way of finding and presenting to people.
Many Front Porch Forum neighborhoods have plenty of content… generated from only several dozen households. It takes a specific design and facilitation in our case.
What do you think about Outside.in?
Williams: I think it’s very interesting. I like the technology and like what they’ve done. I wonder what would happen if you could add Outside.in to a newspaper site. I think there are a lot of good individual pieces but no one has put them all together yet. They’re a lot better together.
One of the things we’re still working out is, ‘What is the logical footprint of a local site and what does it contain?’ If you don’t have everything it’s like having a car without all the wheels. It doesn’t work too well. I don’t think anyone, including me, knows what will work. We’re trying to work out what’s effective for readers and what’s economic for advertisers.
Read the whole piece here.
The Local Onliner reports today from the Where 2.0 conference about online mapping. A couple points of interest…
MapQuest Gm James Greiner brought everything back to Earth with a survey showing that just 42 percent of Internet users use mapping sites, and relatively light penetration of advanced mapping services… just 22 percent want to post a map publicly (i.e. on a blog or Website). The survey found that while advanced imagery (i.e. 3D maps) is considered interesting, with 47 percent planning to use it, just 18 percent currently do. The demand for personalized features may be hotter than advanced imagery, with interest jumping from 49 percent to 68 percent when examples of usage were provided. The survey also found that 75 percent want to save addresses; 55 percent want to share with family and friends; 59 percent want Points of Interest on maps’ 50 percent want to increase the presence of storefronts on maps; and 50 percent want the ability to search select vendors and/or services.
I think this jibes with a larger trend of dot.coms putting out loads of great new technology and getting too far in front of demand. Or in some cases, going far astray… heading off to where the general public is unlikely to ever venture in big numbers. Front Porch Forum uses Googgle Maps API in a simple way and our members seem to appreciate it, but it’s not the main event. Peter goes on to report…
Outside.in co-founder Steven Johnson reminded the audience that “It is not always about the map. We don’t need maps all the time to show us what’s going on.” For Outside.in, a placeblogging site, he said, “we decided to make the map as small as possible” in order to focus on the thoughts of the community.
Hey… that’s what I just said! Excellent point. 😉
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