Category Archives: Local Online
Front Porch Forum on Big Stage
Front Porch Forum just accepted an invitation from co-organizer Micah Sifry to speak at the Personal Democracy Forum on May 18 in New York City. Wow! What an honor and opportunity. Dare I say, I think we have something to add… what we’re doing is unique (from all that I’ve seen at least), off to a promising start, and potentially powerful.
This will be a great event. Speaking or in attendance…
- Becki Donatelli, John McCain ’08
- Esther Dyson, EDventure.org
- Thomas Friedman, New York Times
- Seth Godin, Author
- Chris Hughes, FaceBook
- Arianna Huffington, The Huffington Post
- Kim Malone, Google AdSense
- Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo
- Ryan Montoya, John Edwards ’08
- Craig Newmark, Craigslist
- Joe Trippi, ChangeForAmerica
- Jimmy Wales, Wikipedi
I imagine that we’ll be tucked away in some corner… but we’ll be there! I better start combing the hayseed out of my hair.
Social Network Traffic Numbers Inflated?
MediaVidea reported recently…
News Item #1: A detailed research from HP reveals that 43% of Facebook messages are spam. Marcus from Plentyoffish dating site puts it correctly that you would similar figures on any other social networking sites.
NewsItem #2: A recent Comscore study reports that 3 out of 10 U.S. Internet users delete cookies, which means that sites may be overestimating audiences by a factor as high as 2.5.
Both pieces of information have implications for advertisers who use cookie-based visitor counting and rates of social networking site usage.
I wonder how accurate this is? If this ascertain is on target, how widely known is it? It seems remarkable to me. It might help explain in part the incredibly positive response to Front Porch Forum we’ve found in our initial service area (greater Burlington, Vermont). Subscribe to your neighborhood’s forum and you get no spam… just your neighborhood forum in your inbox every few days. And, our audience is very clear… we have contact information on each one… simple to get an accurate count. This may also contribute to the initial high level of interest among small local business in sponsoring a variety of our neighborhood forums.
FatDoor on the right path?
The Local Onliner previewed FatDoor today… sounds interesting.
The startup crawls the Web for publicly available info (College, job, kids, church, clubs, blogs) and is being designed to provide neighbors with publicly available info about each other so they can establish commonalities from the getgo, rather than sitting in the isolated silos of today’s typical “Bowling Alone” neighborhood.
The site’s motto is “positive social change.” The company hopes that it will help the “neighborhood get stronger, help people develop friendships in their neighborhoods, and become more civic in their involvement in their communities.” It may also be used for more annoying things (telemarketing, real estate pitches etc.) But the site has taken pains to hire a privacy expert to minimize the inherent risks. If it works at all, one imagines it could be a nice complement to something like Zillow, and more dimensional.
FatDoor has some big names and resources behind it, so it’s going somewhere. I’m trying to picture a real-world (vs. virtual) equivalent… tacking everyone’s resume to their front door? Flipping through your neighbor’s mail to see who’s newsletter he’s getting? I like the motto and goals (similar to Front Porch Forum), but I’m not sure this approach will be warmly embraced. I haven’t seen it in action, so hopefully the sense of the site will match up with the promising intent.
Two new citizen journalism reports
Debbie Block-Schwenk points out a couple new resources today for citizen journalism sites:
Citizen Media: Fad or the Future of News? The rise and prospects of hyperlocal journalism was released by J-Lab. The report by Jan Schaffer consolidates and analyzes responses from 191 people involved with or familiar with online citizen media, including 31 operators of citizen media sites.
Also enabled by J-Lab and the Knight Foundation via their New Voices program is a new “cook book” sharing the experiences of the first year of community site Hartsville Today. The site was started by Douglas J. Fisher, a journalism instructor at the University of South Carolina and Graham Osteen, Publisher of The Hartsville Messenger. The report, entitled Hartsville Today: The first year of a small-town citizen journalism site, documents in detail the steps they took, from deciding on a web site domain name to training staff.
eBay vs. Garage Sales
The Local Onliner brought an interesting couple articles to my attention today by New York Times writer Jonathan Berr:
“I was reminded of what made eBay a success while I was reporting the story,” writes Berr, in a separate story picked up by AOL Finance. “First, it’s still a very affordable way for many small businesses who don’t want to spend the money on search advertising to sell their wares on the Internet. eBay also seems to be replacing garage sales as the means that people use to get rid of their junk.” [emphasis added]
I find this last bit troubling. I assert we need more garage sales, not less. Let’s compare on a few fronts:
Community building:
Garage sale… Talk to the blue-haired lady a few doors down about her antique lamp and what the neighborhood used to be like. Buy a watered-down Dixie cup of lemonade from the four-year-old who may be cutting your grass in another ten years. Talk with real people, face to face as you shop… “do you think I’d use this bread machine?” Find a deal.
eBay… Email distant strangers about Barry Bonds bobblehead dolls. Sit by yourself and decide you must have it.
Sustain our environment:
Garage sale… Walk up and down the street. Pull loot home in little red wagon.
eBay… Box up bobblehead, big delivery truck picks up item from sender’s house, trucks and jet aircraft ship across country, another big panel truck rumbles into the neighborhood and leaves cardboard and plastic-entombed doll at your doorstep. The way our society looks back in befuddlement at the Salem witch trials and wiping out millions of buffalo, and other past obvious atrocious behavior… that’s how our kids/grandkids will view behavior like this… “what were you thinking, Gramps?”
Keep your money in the neighborhood…
Garage sale… Your $20 goes to the guy who lives a couple blocks away. He then spends it at the corner store, etc.
eBay… Your $20 is split between the distant seller, eBay, Visa, UPS, Staples (for the box), etc. and leaves your community behind.
We should all put more thought into our personal dot.com practices and avoid uses that cause more harm in the long run than good. Thus ends today’s sermon. 😉
Sex and Romance Drives Craigslist
I’m often asked if Front Porch Forum isn’t an awful lot like craigslist Burlington. Besides the obvious Grand Canyon of a difference in scale and success (all hail craigslist!), I usually answer “no.” While it’s true that both are an online place to sell your used car among other things, they diverge from there.
And now we see some interesting analysis of how craigslist is used, or at least what drives most of its traffic… anonymous sex and romance postings. None of that on Front Porch Forum (how many readers just nixed FPF with that statement? 😉 ).
Stephen Bagg at Compete supplies the chart below:
He adds:
Compete reports just under 17 million people visiting per month… Analysis of eight major American cities shows erotic services consistently garners the highest number of individual visitors for February – almost always twice as many as the next ranking category, averaging 265,000 people per city. Equally racy lists that consistently score high visitor volume are the section for casual encounters as well as personals for women seeking men. The most commonly frequented venue outside of this virtual red-light district? Cars for sale.
Local news, business supplies for sale, real estate and web design are probably better off advertising somewhere else since they contribute less than a whisper to the overall site traffic.
Avoiding the social issues and political debates that fall beyond this brief glimpse behind the Craigslist curtain, perhaps it isn’t shocking that the search for romance is extremely popular in the online space. Offering anonymity, privacy, and little room for embarrassment, Craigslist is an ideal marketplace for those looking for those willing.
So, Front Porch Forum is in some significant sense the opposite of craigslist… no anonymity, out in the open within the neighborhood. Thanks to MediaVidea for highlighting the original information.
Small online groups = high participation
David Weinberger shares today:
A study by Communispace (which, as an online community developer has a horse in the race) says that while big communities necessarily have lots of “eyeballs,”
Results indicate that 86% of the people who log on to private, facilitated communities with 300 to 500 members made contributions: they posted comments, initiated dialogues, participated in chats, brainstormed ideas, shared photos, and more. Only 14% merely logged in to observe, or “lurk.”
By contrast, on public social networking Web sites, blogs, and message boards, this ratio is typically reversed, as the vast majority of site visitors do not contribute. In a typical online forum, for example, just 1% of site visitors contribute, and the other 99% lurk.
This supports what we’re finding with Front Porch Forum. Seven months into our homegrown effort, we’ve seen more than 4,000 local households subscribe to our free neighborhood forums (that’s nearly 20% of Burlington, VT).
Each neighborhood forum covers an area of a few hundred households. Of the 130 neighborhood forums that we’re hosting across the metro region, several dozen are really hopping. Because of the limited and small scale of these forum, among other design details, we see more than half of the members posting messages to their nearby neighbors. Compared to the wide open WWW (wild west web) people feel safe and engaged enough to comment… few lurkers. See past postings about scale.
More about the study from Online Media Daily:
The study, which analyzed participation behavior among 26,539 members of 66 private online communities, also found that consumers prefer fully transparent and branded communities to non-specific, non-branded ones.
“Everybody is talking about communities now, and so the question is no longer ‘should we have one?’, but more ‘what kind should it be?’ and ‘how can we design it to truly engage people and fulfill our objectives?'” said Communispace President and CEO Diane Hessan.
When potential members were considering whether to participate in a community, they were 30% more likely to log on when the welcome notice disclosed the company sponsoring the community. Branded sites had an initial log in rate of 71%, compared with 55% for unbranded sites.
In addition, of the 66 communities analyzed, parent communities, as a group, had the highest levels of participation. In general, the research found that the stronger the “social glue”–or common interests and passions among members–the greater the participation.
The research found that although members of women’s communities participated more frequently than men, men seemed to have more to say when they did participate: 4.8 weekly contributions for men compared to 4.1 for the women.
Notably, educational background and household income were not related to community member participation, as the passion around a community’s purpose appeared to be the main influence on participation.
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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