Category Archives: Local Online
Street-Level Local Online
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!
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
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
The Social Network that stops Traffic!
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
Funding climate favors local online entrepreneurs
From the Local Onliner:
Nick Veronis, managing director of Veronis Suhler Stevenson, says [regarding local online]… that it is a very good time for entrepreneurs to raise money and monetize their local investments. But the climate is not so golden for investors. “Valuations are very high right now,” he says.
Yahoo’s take on Local Online
Peter Krasilovsky reports today about Yahoo Exec VP Hilary Schneider’s keynote at the Kelsey Local ’07 conference this week. Schneider…
emphasized that the company is really zeroing in on local to play a major role in Yahoo’s growth plans. Local search’s share of overall search within Yahoo went from 11 percent to 14 percent in 2006, and local search itself grew 28 percent in the last four months, per ComScore.
Yahoo divides local as:
- Maps – 32M unique visitors
- News and info – 30M
- Social media – 20M
- Classifieds – 20M
- Directory – 18M
Further:
Yahoo Local itself is pretty well built out, with 6,000 city pages and 80,000 zip codes. But it only has 600 neighborhoods. “There are obviously many more than that,” says Schneider. “ We have a long way to go.”
Yahoo looks at the local market as:
- National local – 17,000 businesses spending $22.4 billion in ad dollars
- Regional local – 85,000 businesses spending $48.3 billion
- Local local – 22,000,000 businesses spending $33.6 billion
Where there’s folk, there’s fire
That title is a clever quote from Britt Blaser’s latest post. Thanks to David Weinberger for pointing in that direction. Blaser writes:
The People Law trumps the Power Law. There are five principles I’m playing with lately:
1. The size of your audience confers limited power
2. A network’s value is the square of its nodes (Metcalfe)
3. Network nodes are significant only when they’re verbose
4. Most conversation is among nearby nodes
5. Only interactions count, and the richest count most
I recommend a visit to check out the charts and graphs and his detail… good stuff. Most of these points jibe with what we’re finding with Front Porch Forum. E.g., under point three he states that the purpose of online social networking is face-to-face interaction. That’s what Front Porch Forum is all about… and it works because the people on the online network by definition live in the same neighborhood.
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
Post Categories
- Uncategorized
- PDF2009
- Calendar
- Northeast Kingdom
- podcast
- Peer Rental
- Localization
- Big Tech
- Events
- PDF2007
- Web Traffic
- Google AdSense
- Pay It Forward
- Elections
- berkmansunlight
- Maps
- Video
- Upstate New York
- Coupons
- Wildlife
- Mobile
- Viral Marketing
- Raffle
- Crisis Response
- Donations
- Lost & Found
- Real Estate
- College Students
- Gratitude
- Social Responsibility
- Orton Family Foundation
- Start ups
- Make It Your Own Awards
- Online Civility
- Clay Shirky
- Newspapers
- Humor
- How To Use FPF
- Best of FPF
- Online Classified Ads
- Peer Reviews
- Politics
- Community Management
- Economic Development
- Local Reviews
- Case Foundation
- Borrow and Lend
- Neighborhood Watch
- Good Government
- Small Business Advertising
- Citizen Journalism
- e-Vermont
- Democracy
- Local Search
- Knight Foundation
- Burlington
- MacArthur Fellows
- Civic Engagement
- Social Media
- social capital
- Social Networking
- Vermont
- Neighborhood
- Community Building
- Local Online
- Front Porch Forum