Bob Tedeschi has an interesting article in the New York Times Sunday about local online efforts:
Across the United States, citizen bloggers and deep-pocketed entrepreneurs are creating town-specific, and even neighborhood-specific, Web sites where the public can read and contribute items too small or too fleeting for weekly newspapers. Suburban towns across the greater New York area are joining in, giving residents a new way to avoid traffic snags, find a lost dog or just vent about a local hot-button issue.
“It replaces the guy from 200 years ago who rang the bell in town,” said Chris Marengo, a lawyer in Pleasantville, N.Y., who visits www.Pleasantville.AmericanTowns.com every few days to stay abreast of local events. “It’s as provincial as it gets.”
Pleasantville is one of thousands of municipalities on the AmericanTowns service, which is based in Fairfield, Conn. Like other community-oriented sites, AmericanTowns offers users the chance to post information free, to bolster postings by site editors.
Other sites mentioned include: WestportNow.com and Baristanet. There’s some genuine success here, however, different than Front Porch Forum‘s neighborhood-level approach.
What a delight! I just returned from a couple days in Cambridge, MA… invited to participate at a Harvard workshop about innovative local uses of the internet, focusing on politics. The event was hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Sunlight Foundation. About 50 people were invited from around the country.
About half of the speakers were content providers, mostly local and state-level political bloggers. The other half were online tool developers focused on improving public access to information about state and federal legislatures. I strongly recommend checking out what I was lucky enough to see. Some of the participants have kindly blogged and wiki-ed about it already…
David Weinberger, Ethan Zuckerman, David Gillmor, Campaigns Wikia… and others, I’m sure. Try Technorati (photos too).
On the one hand we had bloggers generating great content about fairly narrow topics. On the other were people developing incredible tools for drilling into all sort of data and stories about what’s really going on behind the scenes in Congress and the statehouses. Most of the folks in both these camps shared one challenge… engaging a wide-enough audience.
So Front Porch Forum was met with curiosity and interest. We’re building surprisingly high participation numbers when viewed from a geographical per capita perspective. Lots of great questions and leads. I need to explore more of what was on display. More later, perhaps.
Thanks to Berkman and Sunlight for bringing me to this wonderful event, and to all my colleagues for sharing their projects and insights. A hopeful way to spend the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. By the way, snow in Vermont kept me in Cambridge/Somerville an extra night… a local cousin came to my rescue!
Millions of dollars are flowing into dot.com start-ups that provide the public a place to read and write reviews on just about anything local… restaurants, stores, etc. Some include: insiderpages.com, judysbook.com, riffs.com, yelp.com, and zipingo.com. Blogosphere comments swirl around their relative merits and their mangement ups and downs… hard to hear the true tune through the din.
Some of the comments seen recently: Rahul Pathak, Naffziger’s Net, Greg Sterling, Andy Sack, TechCrunch and another. It goes on and on, of course. Where’s there’s money invested, there’s commentary.
Front Porch Forum does local review too, but it’s a different model… the reviews are requested and then the reviews come from nearby neighbors. So (1) the reviews are demand driven, and (2) there’s credibility because the advice is coming from the person around the corner with his/her real identity provided. And this is only one of many uses that our neighborhood forums are supporting… classifieds, community organizing, news, etc. It all adds up to helping neighbors connect and foster community within neighborhoods.
In our first city (Burlington, VT), we’re hosting 130 adjacent neighborhood forums that in sum cover the entire metro-area. Five to ten percent of the local households have joined in our first few months with dozens of neighborhoods in the 20-40% range and a couple exceeding 90% already. And it’s all driven by word of mouth and a spinkle of local media attention.
David Wilcox writes about changes in the field of local online and links to several examples in England, France and the United States:
The early models of local online communities – like Oncom – aimed to replicated physical proximity online. “Please come to our your space and contribute ….” Some local interests did, many didn’t, and it proved difficult to get a sustainable mix of funding, advertising, and volunteer effort.
I submitted a comment to his blog about Front Porch Forum… a new model that showing early promise.
For the past couple days a group of old friends, now spread across the country, have exchanged views about global climate change, Al Gore’s movie, and the like. These are dear friends who I don’t really have a chance to connect with anymore, so the exchange was welcomed… even if the topic is a tough one.
Then Margie wrote “does anyone mind if I set up a Yahoo Group for us?” To which I replied “I’ll join, but I’ll bet dollar to donuts that this move will kill the conversation.” “Why?” she asked.
Good question, but I know it’s not uncommon. What is it about Yahoo Groups that seems so appealing when first suggested to help some people communicate, but then often sees the group and it’s postings dry up into an online ghost town? What percentage of Yahoo Groups are dead or dying? How much opportunity is lost?
Another friend in our little crew, Naomi, chimed in “I can’t deal with anything complicated I have to sign up for.” Well that covers a big part of it… Yahoo Groups is not user friendly. Keep in mind that Naomi’s been using a computer most every day for the past 15 years that I’ve known her.
Some folks ask about Front Porch Forum… isn’t it just Yahoo Groups for neighborhoods? No. Not really. It’s simpler, easier to use for the average neighbor, and designed to fulfill our mission… to help neighbors connect and foster community within neighborhoods. Yahoo Groups seems to be designed to be all things to all people… an impressive feat of engineering, but not the best tool if you’re looking to make your neighborhood a great place to live.
Kind of like a Swiss Army knife vs. a screw driver. Need an all-in-one tool that can get the job done in lots of settings? Swiss Army/Yahoo Groups makes sense. Or, do you have a specialized task in mind… driving 100 screws or connecting with your neighbors and fostering community? Then you want the dedicated tool… Front Porch Forum (or the screw driver… you pick).
On second thought, make that a Swiss Army knife that capable folks like Naomi find too hard to pry open.
Peter Krasilovsky packs a lot into his ten brief trends from 2006 for local online. Nearly each of his points supports Front Porch Forum’s position, so check out his full list. Some snippets:
Google and Yahoo have… 70 percent [of local search]. All the others belong in a subset. But the subset, of course, can be lucrative too.
How fast will Google and Yahoo migrate beyond local search, impacting classifieds, brand/display and Yellow Pages. It ought to take awhile.
Sites that protect local positions should get some traction.
Google-style, self-serve [ad sales] solutions will creep up on the industry faster than expected.
We’ll see a lot of localizing [from national advertisers] in 2007.
What surprises me is that the Yellow Pages companies haven’t bothered to buy [local social networks, and ratings/review sites]. Yet.
It’s no secret that the use of online mail lists for neighborhoods is growing, especially, it seems, in more tech-savvy areas. Friends report their widespread use around Austin, TX, for example. And, this weekend, a compelling article by Kathleen Sullivan for the San Francisco Chronicle probes the adoption of Yahoo and Google Groups by neighborhoods all across the Bay area. Kathleen writes:
Thousands of Bay Area residents… have become members of online communities devoted to their neighborhoods, using free services offered by Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and other companies. The groups have attracted renters and homeowners living in condominiums, townhouses, apartments, single-family homes and planned communities.
David Kopp, senior director of Yahoo Groups, said it’s hard to estimate how many people in the Bay Area are chatting about their neighborhoods using its service, because most groups choose to be categorized by subject, not by geography. Some choose not to be listed at all. Many Bay Area neighborhood groups are included in Yahoo’s Cultures & Community category, which lists 700 groups in California. Neighborhood-focused groups can also be found in its Regional and Family & Home categories.
These groups have some design elements in common:
Kopp said most local groups choose the “membership required” option. “They want people in the local area to feel safe and comfortable sharing information and opinions with other members of their local communities,” he said.
[One neighborhood organizer says] “Since we don’t meet over the back fence or in the front yard, we can use this message system to ask for resources, like best cell phone service, set up carpools, find lost pets and more,” she wrote on the group’s home page. “All our responses will be kept in an archive that only members can access. That way, if someone has already replied to ‘What is the city phone number for potholes,’ you can just check the archive.”
Good or bad news for Front Porch Forum? Great news. This is more confirmation of the pent up demand for this kind of service. While Yahoo and Google Groups are dominating giants, there’s room for some start-ups with a different formula to slide in. And, the start-up with just the right recipe might find some surprising success… I know we’re getting some exciting early results. One can dream, eh?
The Local Onliner reports today:
BackFence CEO and co-founder Susan DeFife has resigned from the company, amidst a major downsizing that saw 12 of 18 employees let go. Co-founder Mark Potts will serve as interim CEO as the company looks to solve what he calls “BackFence 2.0.” DeFife… notes that Backfence has built 13 sites in three metro areas… and got two percent of community members to register in its most mature communities. BackFence had received $3 million in funding from… investors back in October 2005.
Without more information than this, it’s hard to say much about this development. But, in the spirit of citizen journalism, let’s give it a shot!
Perhaps BackFence isn’t aiming at the right target. Stories that appeal to an audience across a 50,000 to 100,000 population, i.e., BackFence’s target (e.g., “city council enacts smoking ban in restaurants”) may best be reported by professional journalist, as has been the case for generations. Stories that appeal to residents of one neighborhood, supposedly the cornerstone of BackFence (e.g., “utility work closes Maple St. and Birch Ct. to through traffic this week”) are not of interest to the other 49,000 people in town.
So, a BackFence model runs the risk of combining (A) stories with broad appeal that may not meet professional journalistic standards with (B) lots of micro-stories that are each only interesting to a very small slice of their readership. This brings to mind Cathy Resmer’s piece yesterday about local news and community newspapers.
For comparison sake, after four months, Front Porch Forum has about 6% of metro-Burlington signed up while in early start-up mode. And, our content is parsed out into neighborhoods. So only the one or two neighborhoods affected by the street closure example get that message… not the whole town. The differences don’t stop there.
Front Porch Forum seems to be sweeping through neighborhoods like a social epidemic. A few people in a neighborhood get “infected” and nothing much happens for awhile. Then – BAM – 20, 50, then 100 households join in short order and start sharing messages with neighbors through their online forum. A new family moves into the neighborhood and is “infected” by several neighbors almost before they unpack.
Thanks to John Horchner, an FPF member, for suggesting Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point (2000) vis-a-vis the spread of Front Porch Forum across our initial metro area. From Gladwell’s reading guide:
The Tipping Point is that magic moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. At what point does it become obvious that something has reached a boiling point and is about to tip?
Of our current crop of 130 neighborhood forums, about one-third have “tipped” in our first few months of operation, that is, they have a critical mass of engaged members putting their forum to good use. Most got there when a resident decided to make it happen and went door-to-door with a flyer. Others were sparked by local media attention. Some were pushed over the threshold by a neighborhood controversy playing out through their forum.
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