Local Online | Ghost of Midnight

Where 2.0 Conference Launch Pad

Posted on Monday, May 28, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

O’Reilly is holding the Where 2.0 Conference in San Jose next week on May 29-30, and its Launch Pad portion of the conference will give a handful of search and mapping companies an opportunity to debut their products, which have all been deemed powerful, innovative and promising. Here is a quick rundown of the companies that will be launching at the Where 2.0 conference, most of which are currently in private beta.

Many of these efforts may well impact local online efforts.

Dopplr is a social network formed around your locations.

Fatdoor is looking to be the wikipedia of people, with a reported 130+ million people and business profiles at launch, to be used for search purposes.

GeoCommons is a service to provide people with a way to tell their stories with maps.

Swivel offers graphs and charts on a number of topics, such as extra-marital affairs by country.

UpNext is a 3D virtual cityscape, providing users a way to explore cities.

WeoGeo is a mapping marketplace of sorts, providing tools for business mapping such as surveyors, engineers, cartographers, and scientists for storing, searching and sharing CAD and GIS mapping products.

Daughter sending Parents on Long-Delayed Honeymoon

Posted on Friday, May 25, 2007 by Michael • 1 comment

Here’s a beautiful story that just came across the Airport Drive Neighborhood Forum…

Hi Everyone – This weekend (Sat & Sun, 9am-3pm) I will be holding a yard sale at 33 Forest Street [South Burlington]. The proceeds from this sale will go to send my parents on a much-deserved, very belated honeymoon. This June marks their 30th anniversary. They have never had the money or time to take a honeymoon, or even a vacation together, though they did find the money to provide me with a beautiful wedding last year. To thank them for that, my husband and I are putting on this yard sale to raise the money to send them off on a little honeymoon. How much we raise determines how far we can send them. Ideally, I would like to be able to send them to Maine or the Cape because my mom has never seen the ocean, but has always wanted to.

The yard sale is being held at my parents’ house. They are completely unaware that this is to benefit them. They think I am holding it to raise money for my grad. tuition. So if you can stop by to support this, keep the real purpose of it a secret!

There are ceramics you can paint yourself, yarn, crafty whatnots, books, clothes, dishes, kitchen things, games, toys, etc. Thanks for your support! -Rebekah

If you’re local… stop by a spend a couple bucks. If you’re a Front Porch Forum subscriber, post this message on your own neighborhood forum to help spread the word!

Palore and EveryBlock Answer One Question

Posted on Thursday, May 24, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

From today’s Local Onliner…

We’re all guilty of feature creep. A lot of the stuff isn’t especially useful. Now comes Palore. When it comes to directory listings, Palore believes hardly any of the info is useful. In fact, consumers want to know just one thing.

“The interesting thing was that they all wanted just one thing and didn’t care much about the rest. It was all about users wanting to see something very specific and personalized to them when making a local search,” says [Palore co-founder Hanan] Lifshitz, an Israeli who had previously started a banner exchange network. “They didn’t want more reviews or better maps. They wanted to know things like:

* The size of a restaurant’s wine list
* Does the business have handicap access?
* Is the business sustainable / vegetarian / organic etc.
* Is there free wifi access?
* Did the restaurant win any award?

With such results in mind, Lifshitz launched Palore in Israel a year ago. The service quickly got 100,000 – quite a landmark in a small country – capped it there, and has been working on bringing it stateside since then. He’s raised $1 million from angels to do so, and has set up shop in the Bay Area.

Sounds compelling. In Burlington, lots of folks just post those questions to their neighborhood forum via Front Porch Forum. Not only do they get good results, but they foster relationships with their real-time in-the-flesh neighbors in the process. Next time, they’ll just call out over the backfence to ask about the wine list… offline. (horrors!)

Also… I was just reading more about EveryBlock, the pre-start-up about to get underway by Adrian Holovaty, late of washingtonpost.com and recent winner of a $1.1M grant from the Knight Foundation. His project… To create, test and release open-source software that links databases to allow citizens of a large city to learn (and act on) civic information about their neighborhood or block. His goal… To create an easy way to answer the question, “What’s happening around me?” Hey! That’s one question again.

Big Money for Local Online Projects

Posted on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

From the Local Onliner today…

The Knight Foundation has just issued a list of really big grants that should really jumpstart hyper-local media (and some more traditional media endeavors as well). As Knight itself says, its “News Challenge” was meant to combine “nerds, news and neighborhoods.”

This year’s recipients are getting more than $12 million. In my view, the money is coming at a great time, just as confidence in hyperlocal as both a movement and an “industry” has begun to wane.

Read the full post for details on some of the winners, such as Placeblogger and Villagesoup.

Favorite Posting of the Week!

Posted on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

Here’s a wonderful Front Porch Forum posting from a senior citizen on the ONE East Neighborhood Forum. She was stunned by the quickness and number of responses to her call for lawn help. She’s full of gratitude for those around her who beautify the neighborhood. She issues a safety reminder. And, she offers a $100 reward for return of her lost hearing aids! Read on to see what she was doing when she lost them! -Michael

Wow. What a response to my mowing plea. The 1st one came in at about 1 AM. I am not a regular computer person yet so didn’t check my email until late in the day by which time someone had called me on the phone and then actually mowed my lawn. Thank you so much to the other 5 or 6 people who offered.

Thanks also to the people who plant flowers in the greenbelt and the ones who pick up trash, which I hope someday will be all of us all the time. My grandmother used to stoop over and pick up trash when I was a child and I would be mortified. Now I do it too.

I’m also grateful to the bikers who ride responsibly who mostly seem to be children. It must be hard to remember how quickly a bike can appear out of nowhere and how relatively slowly a car can respond.

I have another topic. Last night I lost one of my hearing aids. I was getting a ride home up North St.on the back of a motorcycle and it was in my left hand pocket. We rode from parking space in front of the brick houses on Elm St. on UU Church property to North St. and then up North St. to 447. There is a $100 reward. Thanks.

Neighborhood Mapping

Posted on Monday, May 21, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

An increasing number of mapping services are incorporating neighborhood data. Google appears to be the latest…

Recently Google Maps introduced the ability to perform searches by neighborhoods. Neighborhoods tend to be somewhat informally defined but well recognized in certain cities. Neighborhood search is now available in fifty US cities, with more to follow.

You can now do searches such as bagels upper east side new york and restaurants, over the rhine, cincinnati on Google Maps. Additionally, this capability allows you to do city-level searches where the city is uniquely named, regardless of size, such as bakery corpus christi, or movie theater albuquerque.

Others include Maponics, Yahoo!, Yelp and others, according to Screenwerk and Unhandled Perception, among others.

Husband Rentals get Press

Posted on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

Paula Routly has a good piece about a local hardware store’s “Rent-A-Husband” service in today’s Seven Days. The dust on this was first kicked up by John Grimm when he joined Front Porch Forum and posted his thoughts… past postings here and here.

First FPF Sponsorship Deal Struck

Posted on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

Seven Days is now Front Porch Forum‘s first sponsor! Thanks to Paula, Pamela, Cathy, Bob and the whole crew there. Here’s one of the FPF ads that will run in Seven Days…

Pew’s Latest Report and FPF

Posted on Thursday, May 10, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

The Pew Internet and American Life Project really cranks out the research. The latest one, A Typology of Information and Communication Technology Users, is, despite the catchy title, a great read full of valuable insights. For example, based on their survey of 4,000 American adults, we break down as such…

Elite Tech Users – 31%
Middle-of-the-Road Tech Users – 20%
Few Tech Assets – 49%

The elite users of information and communications technology (ICT) consist of four groups that have the most information technology, are heavy and frequent users of the internet and cell phones and, to varying degrees, are engaged with user-generated content. Members of these groups have generally high levels of satisfaction about the role of ICTs in their lives, but the groups differ on whether the extra availability is a good thing or not.

The middle-of-the-road users consist of two groups whose outlook toward information technology is task-oriented. They use ICTs for communication more than they use it for self-expression. One group finds this pattern of information technology use satisfying and beneficial, while the other finds it burdensome.

For those with few technology assets (four groups), modern gadgetry is at or near the periphery of their daily lives. Some find it useful, others don’t, and others simply stick to the plain old telephone and television.

Front Porch Forum members, I estimate, are scattered across all of these categories… not just the tech elites. In April 2006 (when the survey was completed), 73% of Americans labeled themselves as internet users (same as cell phones).

Pew reports that 18% of respondents “post comments to an online news group or website,” while 8% have a blog. Looking at the last six months in our flagship Five Sisters Neighborhood Forum, 90% of the neighborhood subscribes and a full 50% of that group posted to their neighborhood forum in the past six months.

Neighborhood Mail Lists Thriving

Posted on Wednesday, May 9, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

Steve Hendrix wrote in The Washington Post today about the widespread use of neighborhood email lists in and around Washington, DC. Read here for lots of interesting examples. (Thanks to E-Democracy.org for the tip.) Also noted…

According to the Pew Center‘s Internet and American Life Project, 55 percent of Internet users subscribed to e-mail group lists in 2006 as a way of maintaining ties with the community or hobby groups they belonged to, up from 32 percent in 2001.

Yahoo, which provides free hosting services in exchange for implanting small ads at the bottom of each message, says it handles more than 8 million groups with more than 100 million members.

So there’s a huge demand for neighborhood email lists and a huge number of people are not yet served. Further, the leading provider in the sector now, Yahoo Groups, is decidedly user-unfriendly and not accessible to lots of people with low computer skills (based on personal experience trying to guide many folks onto and around various Yahoo Groups that I’ve been involved with).

This adds up to great potential for Front Porch Forum.

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