Category Archives: Local Online
Smalltown and i-neighbors going places
Smalltown.com landed $3M in new funds recently to ramp up it’s model of local online. Peter Krasilovsky reports:
Smalltown [is] an IYP site with social aspects via reviews, calendars and (now) Top 10 lists. Five months after launching SME-oriented sites in San Mateo and Burlingame, Smalltown has announced three new Bay Area locales, added video uploads, hired a VP of Sales, and begun a Google campaign.
This is a very interesting effort:
Usage-wise, Rucker says he’s got 3.5 percent of the launched communities visiting on a weekly basis. About 1.8 percent have registered, which gives them the right to review sites, etc. Rucker is aiming for a registered base of three percent.
After six months, Front Porch Forum has about 17% of Burlington, VT registered.
And I just heard that i-neighbors has a new version of their service up and running, although I don’t have any details.
U-G-L-Y Bloggers have no Alibi
Winner of the Vermont-bloggers-are-not-the-most-photogenic-lot essay contest? Philip Baruth, hands down:
Never have so many wonderful people, filled with so many lovely ideas, produced so many aesthetically questionable photographs.
And did he really have to include so much damning evidence to make his case? Seven snapshots and 677 words… I can mount no defense… guilty as charged.
P.S. It was a great event:
In no particular order, we had a full Seven Days contingent, with Freyne and Resmer (as well as mini-Resmer); the men of Green Mountain Daily (J.D. Ryan, Jack McCullough), as well as an erstwhile man of GMD, Odum; Neil Jensen and unflappable friend Oliver; Charity Tensel and Haik Bedrosian; the reclusive Yusef; Jason Lorber and Max, his extremely cool son; Michael Wood-Lewis, of the Front Porch Forum; Bill Simmon, who kicked off the event with a spontaneous Youtube seminar; and many more.
Outside.In attracts $1M (almost)
Peter Krasilovsky reports today:
Outside.In, the place-blogging site that collects everything that appears on the Web in a geographical context – blogs, traditional media, individual contributions — has won $900,000 of funding… The money will allow the the three co-founders to expand to a staff of ten, add new resources, including a “meet your neighbors” section, and expand internationally. The site currently serves 63 cities and 3,217 neighborhoods.
I’m intrigued by Outside.In. If I understand the site, it attempts to tame the flood of information available on the web (or at least some of it) by lining it up according to place. I’ve tried to register this blog on their system for Burlington, VT and it says I was successful, but then I can’t find any mention of it… I must be missing something.
But more important than my incompetence as a visitor (I wonder how many non-techies will embrace this site?), I looked at some places where I’ve lived in the past that are also well-established Outside.In locations and I’m left with conflicting reactions… (A) wow, cool vs. (B) too much… make it stop! I absorb a lot of media on any given day… not as much as your average hyper-blogger, but way more than most of the John Does I know. And what I’ve seen on Outside.In is a good start, but the information has not been tamed enough. Makes me feel like someone left the tap running. So I should take another look to understand it better.
The Local Onliner goes on to say:
Union Square’s Fred Wilson [one of the investors], in a press release, presents an interesting hypothesis about his latest investment. “The best Web services are two-way systems. They take content in, add something to it, and then send it back out. YouTube works this way. So do Delicious and Flickr. To date, we haven’t seen such a service for local information online. Outside.in will hopefully fill that void.”
Front Porch Forum does this at a neighborhood level with neighbors’ words. We’ve taken in thousands of postings, added value, and put them back out to our neighborhood forums.
On his blog, Wilson has more: “Look at the advertisers who populate the local paper, the Yellow Pages, and the local radio stations. They need a place to go online and when they find it, the dollars that will flow are large, very large. Clearly search will get a big piece of that pie (search always does), but the killer local service is one that can serve the residents and the merchants of a city, town, and neighborhood the way the local paper has in the past.”
We plan to test our sponsorship program in Burlington, Vermont this month. Initial reaction from our members (17% of the city subscribed in our first six months) is encouraging. Those I’ve spoken with don’t see the messages from sponsors as advertising, rather just another message about their neighborhood or side of town. Can I be hopeful and skeptical at the same time?
Monthly Sampler: Neighborhood Poker Game
So I tried listing a week’s worth of message titles a couple times (here and here), and now a month and nearly 2,000 new messages have slipped by… too many to list. Let’s go with some samples of what Front Porch Forum members wrote in February:
Let’s get a neighborhood poker game started in the King Maple area of Burlington.- Dog lost in the big box parking lots. Dog found!
- Did anyone else’s propane price go up nearly 50% last month in Hinesburg?
- Warm maple-cinnamon buns delivered to your Charlotte home for school fundraiser.
- New baby coming and hand-me-downs needed in the Five Sisters.
- Lots of ideas discussed for underutilized corner store space on St. Paul Street.
- Neighbors stepping up to reclaim ailing pocket park at S. Winooski and St. Paul.
- Seeking kombucha tea culture… I have no idea what this is.
- Snowpants needed for Somali Bantu kids sledding this week.
- Details of emergencies sent to specific neighborhoods from Burlington Fire Department.
- Discussion about changing Barlow Street to one-way in Winooski.
- Intervale car break-ins reported and discussed.
- South End car ransacker nabbed; police ask forum members to reclaim recovered loot.
- The usual array of housing, cars, furniture, contractor, etc. postings.
- Free couch, iMac, printers, linens, baby stuff, desk, slip cover, ficus plant, misc. electronics, etc.
- Lots of discussions about broadband and TV options across the county.
- Lots of Town Meeting lead-up announcements and opinions.
- Lots and lots snow-related requests, offers, complaints and thanks.
- Oh… and there’s always cats. This month’s tip… look under your porch after a blizzard. Several folks found snowed-in kitties eager to get out, get fed and get warm!
Craigslist didn’t kill Newspapers
I just read an interesting article from the U.K. about Craigslist, based on an interview with CEO Jim Buckmaster. On daily newspapers in the United States:
“I think it’s exaggerated to say that Craigslist has had a devastating impact on classifieds revenue,” said Buckmaster. “Newspapers as an industry are still twice as profitable as the average United States industry.”
“Journalism as practiced at newspapers has been hurt by an excess of money over the years as you’ve seen newspapers bought and sold and consolidated into large chains run by corporate managers to maximise profit, and increasingly over decades have resorted to running wire stories, putting an ever-greater proportion of advertising into their newspapers and shying away from writing hard-hitting stories about corruption in high places,” said Buckmaster. “The financial position of newspapers has not declined, it has more plateaued.”
And on dot.com business models:
“Our goal is to maximise utility for users, so we concentrate on doing what users ask us to do and little else. We do want to run a healthy business and we do have a healthy business, but beyond that maximising profits and revenues has never been a primary goal. It’s unfathomable to the financial community and Wall Street, it’s antithetical to their whole world view, it’s sacrilegious.”
It is in the top 10 English language websites by traffic, it serves six billion pages a month to 10 million users, yet it only employs 23 staff. It is those low costs which have kept it in business.
“It was fairly ironic, 100 per cent of dotcoms were geared toward trying to achieve an IPO and make a lot of money and 99 per cent or more of those companies went bust without making a nickel,” said Buckmaster. “Craigslist was never about money, and yet we were one of the very few that came through the bust and have done well year after year.”
Classified-type postings within neighborhood forums continue to grow at Front Porch Forum. I’ve heard from many of our members that when they failed to get a response to classified ads posted in the local paper and craigslist, they’ve turned to Front Porch Forum. They post a note to their neighbors and receive 3-4 responses within 24 hours. Doing business with a neighbor vs. a stranger is a big difference. Would you rather buy a used car for your teenager from some stranger 45-minutes away, or from the neighbor around the corner? Plenty of examples on our Testimonials page and past blog entries.
Winooski turns to Front Porch Forum
Andy Potter filed a wonderful story for Channel 3 News tonight about how the City of Winooski is turning to Front Porch Forum. Video below. Text here and on the WCAX website.
[quicktime width=”240″ height=”180″]http://frontporchforum.com/about/WCAX20070225.mov[/quicktime]
Forum Members answer Call to Shovel
Dozens of Front Porch Forum members requested help from their neighbors in the wake of the blizzard… most in need of snow removal. Others posted generous offers to help. We also were glad to help spread the word about Operation Snow Shovel… apparently to good effect:
Thanks so, so much for posting the message about Operation Snow Shovel throughout Burlington. The response was incredible! Can you believe that I’ve heard from 57 people willing to volunteer to shovel? 57! (That’s in addition to the 33 permanent volunteers who shovel for a particular person each time it snows– many of them were recruited through Front Porch Forum, too.) A large percentage of volunteers said they’d heard about the need through their neighborhood forum.
As of right now, every single elderly or disabled person in need of help that contacted OSS has been accommodated. And those I’ve yet to hear from will get help quickly. What a wonderful resource these forums are! Many, many thanks!
Angie Spong
The Center for Community and Neighborhoods
WCAX covered this story on the evening news too.
Citizen Media Survey
Wow! I just waded through the new study about online citizen journalism by the Knight Citizen News Network at the University of Maryland (thanks to the Local Onliner for the link). They surveyed a gaggled of local news/blog sites and wrote up their findings.
Front Porch Forum is a second cousin to this type of site, but not a sibling. Some comparisons:
Overall there was little accountability built in for content contributors: 73% of all respondents said their sites didn’t require users to register; 69% said a valid e-mail was not even required before posting. Only 40% of 141 respondents said their sites required contributors to use their real names; 60% said their sites allowed either anonymous posts or the use of “screen” names.
Front Porch Forum requires first and last names, street address and email address.
Asked whether their sites edited contributions before they were posted, 40% of 149 replies said content was edited; 48% said it was not and 12% just didn’t know. Half (50% of 131 replies) said offensive or inappropriate content was filtered out before posting. Most respondents (66% of 119 replies) said their sites removed offensive or inappropriate content after it was posted; but 17% of the respondents said such content was not removed, and 17% just didn’t know.
Front Porch Forum does not edit content, but it does screen all postings, add headlines and clean up formatting.
Half the respondents reported that 26 or fewer people overall were contributing content or skills to their enterprise, although site operators say many of those are just occasional contributors.
When we analyzed our flagship neighborhood forum that covers an area of 350 households, we found that about:
-300 households subscribe (after six years)
-200 households have posted at least one message
-100 households have posted at least six messages
For the past five months we’ve been hosting 130 neighborhood forums covering the Burlington, Vermont area. More than 15% of the city’s households have joined already. I’m not sure how many of those people are contributing, but I’d guess that it’s significantly greater than on many of the surveyed sites.
Based on their own definitions of “success,” 73% of our survey respondents pronounced their sites to be successful.
Well, it’s early, but I’ll give Front Porch Forum a thumbs up on the “success” question at this point. It seems most of the sites in the survey focus on success around journalistic goals of informing and engaging the public. Our purpose is to help neighbors connect and foster community within neighborhoods. Local news from our members to their neighbors contributes to that process, but it’s not the end goal.
Does anyone get paid? Of the 78 who replied: 33% said their sites had no paid workers; 33% said only one or two workers got paid.
We’re in the 33%. 😉
Small steps toward Neighborliness
Kevin Harris writes this week:
I’m trying to write a paper about neighbourliness and have been thinking about the reciprocity of acts of neighbouring… research has found that… sometimes one neighbour helps out another without getting much in return, and keeps doing so.
However, the researchers only included… “favours” in their study, and it seems to me that other, intangible forms of interpersonal behaviour which are in some way supportive – for instance a sympathetic chat on the doorstep to provide comfort in the face of bad news, or the sharing of information about local services – are likely to be viewed by neighbours as valid contributions to the same exchange relationship.
Many years ago I recall rushing out of my house shouting when I saw from my window a neighbour’s toddler stepping into the road, as the mother was getting the shopping from her car. For this simple act I was rewarded almost immediately with a bottle of wine from the shopping bag. It was clear that I had to accept it, not least because there was probably a confused swelling wave of guilt as well as gratitude in her expression of thanks. But it was also, of course, a recognition of the non-obligatory, but potentially vital, role of neighbour.
This begins to get at what’s unfolding in some of the areas served by Front Porch Forum‘s more successful neighborhood forums. Some how the accumulation of lots of little items are creating an environment more welcoming of overt “good neighbor” acts, like baking a cake for a neighbor in need of boost. That’s an odd move if you’ve only interacted with the person once or twice, but is more reasonable if you’re both subscribed to the same small and lively neighborhood forum.
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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