Local Online | Ghost of Midnight

Neighbors’ Forum-Talk spurs Action

Posted on Monday, April 9, 2007 by Michael • 1 comment

Regular folks are using Front Porch Forum to get the attention of local media and elected officials. Some examples:

1. Neighbors on the ONE Central Neighborhood Forum have several interesting threads going recently. One is about the state of the new beltline bikepath… trash, homeless folks, human waste, and various ideas for making it all better. Lots of good input and ideas. Relevant officials are tuning in. Mention of a grant for fencing. Progress?

2. Meanwhile, just up the hill a bit, the ONE East Neighborhood Forum has been focused on college-student noise in this residential neighborhood. Frustrations have been aired, the problem defined, history provided, solutions proposed… and now an official response. The City of Burlington and UVM issued a press release outlining all that they already do on this front and what they plan to add… a step in the right direction. One subscriber writes to his neighbors:

This Forum is the first time people have had a vehicle to express their thoughts, make suggestions and actually have an impact on a variety of topics; but it has been very interesting to see how local officials and social activists are reacting to the ‘elephant in the room’ – indignity over student behavior and the determination to put and end to it. This is an elephant, by the way, that has been in the room for decades now.

3. And the remarkable situation of city council Democrats lining up behind a Republican for council president, rather than a Progressive… several people have made their voices heard to their neighbors and councilors via their neighborhood forum. In fact, the Burlington Free Press almost mentioned Front Porch Forum in its April 8 article:

[Councilor-elect Ed] Adrian explained why he is voting for Wright in a message he posted on the Buell Street Neighborhood Forum. He said Wright, a state representative as well as councilor, has more experience than Ashe, would offer a balance to the Progressive administration of Mayor Bob Kiss, would be fair, would be unable, as one of just three Republicans on the council, to “stack” council committees, and, Adrian pointed out, Democrats, even with five of them on the council, don’t have a candidate for president this year.

[Councilor Joan] Shannon justified her vote for Wright in similar terms in a message posted on the Five Sisters Neighborhood Forum.

(The material referenced for this article should have been attributed to Front Porch Forum, rather than (or in addition to) the individual neighborhood forums.)

eBay vs. Garage Sales

Posted on Monday, April 9, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

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

Posted on Friday, April 6, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

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

Posted on Monday, April 2, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

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.

Street-Level Local Online

Posted on Thursday, March 29, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

There’s a new player in local online… at the street level. It’s called StreetAdvisor. Users log on by street address and then rate their street. There’s some social networking elements too. The company plans to advertise locally to get people to start supplying data.

My two cents: As with most local online efforts that depend on user input, the need for lots of active users seems to outweigh the degree of nifty-ness of the bells and whistles. This is a nifty site without users… so time will tell. It takes a different angle than anything else I’ve seen out there… which I value.

Front Porch Forum is all about getting users on board and engaged with each other first. We have more bells and whistles on the drawing board, but it’s the personal connection with neighbors and concern about neighborhood that drive our service. More than 4,000 households in our one test area signed on in our first six months… 15% of Burlington, Vermont… with zero marketing. People love it so much that they’re going door-to-door to recruit neighbors.

TechCrunch, WebWare and Mashable have blog entries about StreetAdvisor. Thanks to David Wilcox for encouraging me to take a second look at it.

Thousands of Front Porch Forum Members Honored Tonight!

Posted on Tuesday, March 27, 2007 by Michael • 1 comment

Ain’t that a pip! Preservation Burlington honored Front Porch Forum tonight at its annual meeting with its 2007 Ray O’Connor Community Improvement Award. Although I got to be the person up front receiving the plaque and certificate, this recognition really goes out to the more than 4,000 people who have signed up and put their neighborhood forums to work. It’s a beautiful thing to watch it all unfold.

So… thanks to Preservation Burlington and congratulations to all the members of Front Porch Forum! What’s next?!?!

House finds Buyers through Forum

Posted on Monday, March 26, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

People report remarkable and routine successes from their Front Porch Forum postings. I find the one just received below to be amazing considering how much the real estate market has slowed locally (e.g., the lovely home next door to ours has been on the market for about a year).

I sent a brief email to our Forum to let folks know our house was for sale. Within a few days, I had 9 responses, 4 people who came to look at it, and 2 people ready to make an offer. What a great way to target folks with an interest in our neighborhood. And what a relief to have the daunting marketing of our home made so easy. Thanks! -C.H., ONE Central Neighborhood Forum

Corner Store gets Neighbors’ Attention

Posted on Saturday, March 24, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

Interesting the ways folks are finding to use their neighborhood forums. A recent example covered by Seven Days reporter Suzanne Podhaizer:

The Springflower Market on St. Paul Street in Burlington is up for sale. But, rather than letting real-estate supply and demand determine its next incarnation, residents of the neighborhood want to weigh in. After a rousing discussion on the online network Front Porch Forum, Joey Corcoran of South Winooski Avenue offered to host a meet-up at her house.

A dozen people showed up, including Gregory Clairmont, the realtor who is representing the property, Democratic City Councilor Andy Montroll and Emily and Chris Conn, who live right across the street from Springflower. The Conns dream about opening their own caf© and market. Although they don’t have the money to buy the place outright, they hope to find an investor willing to put up the capital. The couple came to the meeting with business plan in hand.

Check out the full article here.

The Social Network that stops Traffic!

Posted on Friday, March 23, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

I’ve poked around various social networking sites and some impress with a feeling of community among distant strangers, others with sheer size or whiz-bang technology. But I’ve never seen anything that elicits the reaction that we’re seeing to Front Porch Forum in the neighborhoods where it’s really caught on in this corner of Vermont.

The other day as a I walked along the sidewalk in downtown Burlington, a woman drove past and did a double take. Break lights… she jumped out and ran over to give me a hug… “you’re the forum guy, right?!?!” Her car door hung open and the guy in the Audi behind her started fuming. Her house had burned the week before and her neighbors had rallied around her and her kids through Front Porch Forum. We kept it short and traffic resumed.

Not the first time we’ve seen neighbors pulling together to help one of their own, nor the first public tears of appreciation I’ve witnessed. People are genuinely moved when they connect with the people who live around them… when a degree of isolation is broken through.

And today from a different person we heard:

Front Porch Forum has connected us to our neighbors and the community quickly and profoundly. We’ve been in Burlington only nine months but because of the forum we feel that we know our neighbors, even if we haven’t actually met all of them. And when we have questions or information to share, it’s an easy, friendly way to get answers or help and share what we know with other people. Our experience of Burlington is so intimately tied up with Front Porch Forum at this point that they go together in our minds. Burlington = Front Porch Forum = community = connection = Burlington. L.D., Five Sisters Neighborhood Forum

Seniors know how to do community

Posted on Thursday, March 22, 2007 by Michael • Comments are off for this post

Today’s senior citizens know about great community because so many of them experienced it in past decades. Now, in their 60s, 70s, 80s and beyond, a collective call seems to be rising from this chorus of elders… “we need to connect with and support each other!”

At least that’s the message I’m getting through a series of conversations I’m having with senior citizens and various support organizations. Today I was honored to speak at the Charlotte Senior Center and Front Porch Forum received a wonderful welcome. Said one lovely attendee:

What you are doing is very special – like the honest-to-goodness connections I remember from “the olden days” – the 50’s and 60’s in Shelburne – that somehow we let “life” take away. Thanks for answering the yearning of so many and for updating it in such an inventive and warm way.

She also expressed frustration when “they” assume that she doesn’t “do email.” She’s all over it. I was surprised when we got our first octogenarian Front Porch Forum member, but now we enough 80-year-olds that it no longer grabs my attention. We also get adult children of people that age signing up on behalf of mom or dad and acting as a bridge to their neighbors through Front Porch Forum… another subscriber innovation that we didn’t anticipate!
I’ve written here already of relevant FPF stories… e.g., snow 1 and 2 and cancer 1 and 2.

And here’s news of another model from Boston (courtesy of MyDecide blog):

Beacon Hill Village helps persons age 50 and older who live on Beacon Hill and in its adjacent neighborhoods enjoy safer, healthier and more independent lives in their own homes–well connected to a familiar and attentive community. Faced with the prospect of leaving the neighborhood they love in order to obtain the services of a retirement community, a group of long-time Beacon Hill residents decided to create a better alternative. Beacon Hill Village is designed to make remaining at home a safe, comfortable and cost-effective solution.

Category Archives: Local Online

eBay vs. Garage Sales

Thousands of Front Porch Forum Members Honored Tonight!

House finds Buyers through Forum

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