Category Archives: Neighborhood

Favorite Posting of the Week!

Posted on Wednesday, May 23, 2007 by No comments yet

Here’s a wonderful Front Porch Forum posting from a senior citizen on the ONE East Neighborhood Forum.  She was stunned by the quickness and number of responses to her call for lawn help.  She’s full of gratitude for those around her who beautify the neighborhood.  She issues a safety reminder.  And, she offers a $100 reward for return of her lost hearing aids!  Read on to see what she was doing when she lost them!  -Michael

Wow. What a response to my mowing plea. The 1st one came in at about 1 AM. I am not a regular computer person yet so didn’t check my email until late in the day by which time someone had called me on the phone and then actually mowed my lawn. Thank you so much to the other 5 or 6 people who offered.

Thanks also to the people who plant flowers in the greenbelt and the ones who pick up trash, which I hope someday will be all of us all the time. My grandmother used to stoop over and pick up trash when I was a child and I would be mortified. Now I do it too.

I’m also grateful to the bikers who ride responsibly who mostly seem to be children. It must be hard to remember how quickly a bike can appear out of nowhere and how relatively slowly a car can respond.

I have another topic. Last night I lost one of my hearing aids. I was getting a ride home up North St.on the back of a motorcycle and it was in my left hand pocket. We rode from parking space in front of the brick houses on Elm St. on UU Church property to North St. and then up North St. to 447. There is a $100 reward. Thanks.

Neighborhood Mapping

Posted on Monday, May 21, 2007 by No comments yet

An increasing number of mapping services are incorporating neighborhood data. Google appears to be the latest…

Recently Google Maps introduced the ability to perform searches by neighborhoods. Neighborhoods tend to be somewhat informally defined but well recognized in certain cities. Neighborhood search is now available in fifty US cities, with more to follow.

You can now do searches such as bagels upper east side new york and restaurants, over the rhine, cincinnati on Google Maps. Additionally, this capability allows you to do city-level searches where the city is uniquely named, regardless of size, such as bakery corpus christi, or movie theater albuquerque.

Others include Maponics, Yahoo!, Yelp and others, according to Screenwerk and Unhandled Perception, among others.

Ermine, Fisher Cat, Moose visit City Cousins

Posted on Sunday, May 20, 2007 by 1 comment

Front Porch Forum members have a way of surprising me. Every time I think the postings are getting predictable, someone writes to their neighbors with something a bit different.

This past week it was an innocent enough question in the King Maple Neighborhood Forum in an urban section of Burlington, VT…

What’s the weirdest animal you’ve seen in your yard?

Some of the answers…

•We’ve had zillions of squirrels, skunks, mice, raccoons and bats. I’d have to say an opossum is the oddest visitor. A couple friends of mine swear they saw a fisher cat run through the yard once, but I think it was some kind of weasel.
•I’ve definitely had possum, used to have a family of badgers till my neighbor ‘eradicated’ them, but the most unusual was a pure white ermine that hung around one winter.
•We have seen possum in our back yard. We also have a family of skunks living under our house, though our neighbors are convinced the family is under their own house. Hard to tell. And raccoons are everywhere, living who knows where, probably in trees at night in the warmer months.
•My beau just reminded me today that we once saw a porcupine passing through here. Some friends said they saw foxes on Main Street. Another friend told me a story about seeing a moose near the Burlington Square Mall around 3 a.m. a few years back. Kooky!

Keeping Tabs on Neighborhood from Afar

Posted on Tuesday, May 15, 2007 by No comments yet

Peggy wrote today as her one-year abroad is wrapping up…

I must tell you that reading all the FPF postings has been a nice way for me to stay connected with our neighborhood! Just another great reason to be a part of the forum!!

Neighborhood Mail Lists Thriving

Posted on Wednesday, May 9, 2007 by No comments yet

Steve Hendrix wrote in The Washington Post today about the widespread use of neighborhood email lists in and around Washington, DC. Read here for lots of interesting examples. (Thanks to E-Democracy.org for the tip.) Also noted…

According to the Pew Center‘s Internet and American Life Project, 55 percent of Internet users subscribed to e-mail group lists in 2006 as a way of maintaining ties with the community or hobby groups they belonged to, up from 32 percent in 2001.

Yahoo, which provides free hosting services in exchange for implanting small ads at the bottom of each message, says it handles more than 8 million groups with more than 100 million members.

So there’s a huge demand for neighborhood email lists and a huge number of people are not yet served. Further, the leading provider in the sector now, Yahoo Groups, is decidedly user-unfriendly and not accessible to lots of people with low computer skills (based on personal experience trying to guide many folks onto and around various Yahoo Groups that I’ve been involved with).

This adds up to great potential for Front Porch Forum.

Online Community and Access

Posted on Monday, May 7, 2007 by No comments yet

Some of our more internet-savvy Front Porch Forum subscribers get frustrated with the lack of features in our current offering. Some requests we get from this group are solid and sensible, while others stray into the bells and whistles category. Ultimately, satisfaction comes to these high-end folks when they adjust their expectations.

Front Porch Forum is a walk down a tree-lined village street vs. some other Web 2.0 sites that are more akin to navigating L.A.’s freeways during rush hour.

One of our long-running goals with this service has been to keep it so simple that anyone who uses the internet can participate… regardless of skill, operating system, connection speed, etc.

I was a little surprised today when Deb, a subscriber who has made great use of her neighborhood’s forum (found a lost dog, met people, raised a crowd of volunteers for a clean-up event, etc.) confessed today that she considers herself very much NOT a computer person. In fact, she has yet to successfully log into the member-only section of our site.

Wow! That’s exactly what we set out to do… reach people who care about their neighborhood, regardless of computer skill. Deb can send and receive email… so she can participate in her neighborhood forum… and she does just that in a big way. When I told her of our goal of wide access, regardless of computer know-how, she answered… “You are succeeding FAMOUSLY with that goal!!” Thanks Deb!

Turn out a crowd of volunteers!

Posted on Monday, May 7, 2007 by 1 comment

Front Porch Forum continues to be a great way to turn out a crowd for volunteer activities and events.  Deb just wrote in that her neighborhood had a record-breaking group show up for Vermont’s annual Green Up Day

I continue to be amazed with the effectiveness of the Forum and give it full credit for the historically large turn-out for our recent Green Up Day activities in ONE East.

Front Porch Forum rather than eBay

Posted on Monday, May 7, 2007 by No comments yet

I wrote a day or two ago about how many of our subscribers prefer using Front Porch Forum rather than other online services for many things. Here’s another example from Pete in Burlington’s Old North End (ONE)…

Hi neighbors – I’d like to sell my pickup truck — it’s way more vehicle than I need. It’s a white 1997 Dodge Ram… The Blue Book value is $6,115, but I’m happy to entertain any and all offers. Feel free to test drive it, too. I’d much rather see it go to an ONE neighbor than deal with the eBay world.

Online Forum Yields Face-to-Face Community

Posted on Monday, May 7, 2007 by 1 comment

From a not-quite-yet-mature neighborhood forum in South Burlington… C.L. is welcoming long-time neighbors who just subscribed…

Welcome Nancy and Dick! It is kind of sad that this is how we have to communicate! Hope you are doing well and we do need to catch up! XOXO C.L.

As counterintuitive as it seems, people report that their online forums lead to MORE face-to-face time with neighbors. In fact, this is the most valued aspect of Front Porch Forum by members in neighborhoods with active and “full-grown” forums.

When enough folks join a given neighborhood forum and start using it, people seem to start organizing more block parties, street-wide yard sales, Green Up Day efforts, community action to get a new stop sign or potholes filled, etc. Lots of small things too… dog and toddler play groups, school and work carpools, support groups to lend a hand to an elder neighbor with yard chores, a regular poker game, etc.

A generation or two ago, it seems, most homes had a stay-at-home mom who was in the neighborhood all day and family size was larger and the little ones were home all day… lots of bodies in the neighborhood all day. Now, many neighborhoods are ghost towns during the weekday. The face-to-face neighborhood grapevine that thrived over back fence, around the kitchen table over coffee, and, dare I say, on the front porch, has withered in many places. Enter the virtual Front Porch Forum. Not to replace face-to-face… but to help folks rebuild the neighborhood grapevine and connect in person more.

It’s working in many places! A neighborhood forum seems to require 50-100 members to really get rolling. The one above has about 20 members (out of about 300 households) and three local officials who tune in. A simple door-to-door flyering and/or sign-up sheet on a clipboard will push those numbers up toward the critical mass needed.

Every Neighborhood deserves a Maypole

Posted on Sunday, May 6, 2007 by 1 comment

I love a good neighborhood party. Liz, Bill and Willy hosted a great one last weekend… May Day! We even had a genuine maypole going. Some neighborhood musicians kept the music flowing. Garlands were woven and worn. Little ones underfoot. And a perfect spring day. Thanks neighbors!

Photo:  Wolfgang Hokenmaier