In classic form, the Burlington Free Press published an unsigned editorial today following up a recent piece of its reporting. Topic? Local government should use online social media…
More communities throughout Vermont should make better use of social media if only to keep residents informed and engaged. More people are turning to online services such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to be informed (entertained) and connected.
Local governments must make every effort to be where the people are. The Free Press reports that connection is missing in many towns and cities. Many towns post information on their official Web sites. Some towns also monitor Web-based networks with a hyper-local focus — by streets or neighborhoods — such as Front Porch Forum. But these kinds of online tools are largely passive…
Yes, I agree that local government’s mission is well served when they make effective use of social media. But the reporting and conclusion about Front Porch Forum miss the mark. (In fact, here are two examples of past Free Press articles that reported just the opposite of today’s editorial… here and here.)
For example, in the City of Burlington, 40% of the households subscribe and nearly every city councilor, school board member, and state rep. uses the service. Most Neighborhood Planning Assembly steering committee members partake, as do almost all City departments. In all, 250 local public officials make use of Front Porch Forum in Chittenden County, our pilot region.
And their use of it is anything but passive. A call to City Councilors, like Joan Shannon or Bill Keogh in the South End, would have set the record straight. They, like many other public servants, make frequent use of FPF to engage voters about a wide array of issues.
Further, citizen use of FPF is certainly not passive… that’s who does all the postings… thousand upon thousand of messages are exchanged among clearly identified nearby neighbors through Front Porch Forum (as many of the Free Press reporters and editors should know from personal experience in their own neighborhoods).
“… these kind of online tools are largely passive” — that’s actually a better description of traditional media, e.g., a newspaper, where professionals provide nearly all of the content. On FPF, the content comes from your nearby neighbors.
Finally, “social media” consultants are a dime a dozen these days, and most are telling businesses, governments, nonprofits, etc. the same thing… get into social media and start screaming your message across many different platforms. Anyone deaf yet? It’s growing ever harder to get people’s attention and hold it, let alone to get them to contribute to a discussion. Gratefully, FPF is full of more than 15,000 local people, most of whom are tuned in and making a difference.
UPDATE: An update is posted above.
The “local” web is all a-buzz today…
EveryBlock has been acquired by MSNBC.com
From the Local Onliner…
While the site takes a unique approach, it is poised to compete with other hyperlocal sites such as Outside.in, Topix.net, Placeblogger and Patch.com (acquired by AOL this summer for $10 million).
From TechCrunch…
EveryBlock currently covers only about 15 cities in the U.S. and comScore estimates its U.S. audience to be only 143,000 unique visitors a month (July, 2009). In contrast, competitor Outside.in attracts 800,000 unique visitors in the U.S. These are relatively small numbers, but these services do a good job of collecting neighborhood news without the expense of actually reporting it.
From Kara Swisher…
MSNBC.com–a joint venture of Microsoft (MSFT) and GE (GE) unit NBC Universal–paid several million dollars for the “hyper-local” information site, which is up and running in 15 cities, including New York, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago and Boston, sources said.
In June, Time Warner (TWX) online unit AOL paid about $10 million to buy Patch Media.
The New York-based start-up is a platform that does deeply localized coverage of communities on a range of topics, from announcements to news to events to obituaries. It is aimed at competing with local newspapers and other media.
EveryBlock takes a slightly different approach, scouring a mass of publicly available data in a variety of U.S. cities from a variety of public records–such as crime stats, building permits and restaurant inspections–and reassembling them into more comprehensible and geographically relevant news feeds, depending on what a user asks for.
And we’ve been asking the same question as Gotham Gazette…
… anyone familiar with the Knight News Challenge knows about Knight’s open source requirement: projects developed with Knight funding must be released under an open source license — it is one of the terms of funding. EveryBlock released their source code a few months ago, but Biella Coleman posed an excellent question
“Since the code is under a GPL3, doesn’t MSNBC.com have to also keep it under the same license if modified? Or can they take the code base since Everyblock is a web-based service?”
… And, James Vasile at Hacker Visions has an answer. It is a complex answer, and worth a read. Loosely? The holder of the copyright is not necessarily bound by the license a project was released under.
Fast Company magazine published story (Sept. 2009) about the state of “hyperlocal” news websites, with the typical emphasis on mostly huge international carpetbaggers (AOL, the Times, etc.) and their efforts to appear truly local. Most of the focus is on advertising dollars…
Hyperlocal sites — covering cities, towns, or just a neighborhood — can deliver precision-targeted advertising to local and global businesses. As the once-exponential growth rate for most Internet advertising in the United States grinds to a halt, the online local-advertising market is projected to grow 5.4% in 2009 to $13.3 billion, according to media research firm Borrell Associates….
Boosters routinely note that more than $100 billion is spent annually on local ads — TV, radio, print, outdoor, direct mail, and online. Although the stat’s origins are fuzzy, what’s clear is how aggressively folks believe those ad dollars are migrating to the Web. Borrell Associates projects an online local-ad market worth $15.5 billion by 2013, fueled mostly by small businesses ditching the Yellow Pages and local newspapers.
There is a gap between these rosy projections and the more bleak reality. Debbie Galant is the “Queen of Hyperlocal,” as crowned by new-media consultant and hyperlocal cheerleader Jeff Jarvis. Her site, Baristanet, serving Montclair, New Jersey, is often cited as proof that hyperlocal can be profitable. But Galant declines to specify what that profit is. “It’s real money,” she says. “We’ll share that our ad revenue is six figures. But we won’t go into more detail than that.”
The truth is that billions are not migrating to hyperlocal sites. “Advertisers have no interest in community Web sites,” says Gordon Borrell, CEO of the analyst firm whose statistics are routinely cited as evidence of hyperlocal’s bright future. “They don’t have the type of material advertisers want to be around,” referring to archetypal hyperlocal stories about high school basketball and drug arrests. “Sites are connecting the dots inappropriately.”
Even if the editorial mix changed, the ad model may be irreparably flawed. Consider the business model that Patch is pursuing in its three original New Jersey towns. Maplewood, South Orange, and Millburn have a combined population of around 60,000. Patch charges advertisers $15 per thousand impressions. If every resident in all of these towns contributed one impression a day — and all of those impressions were sold out — Patch would make $900 a day in revenue, or about $325,000 a year. Not exactly a windfall after expenses…
Thanks to our many supporters, Front Porch Forum is hitting some great milestones…
And FPF is growing. More people sign up every day, more postings flow through FPF to neighbors, and we’re expanding to more towns… stay tuned!
Andrew Shotland takes on Twitter and local in his recent post…
There has been a lot of digital ink spilled over Twitter’s local search implications. Over the past few months several Twitter services have launched with a local angle. I thought it would be interesting to get them all in one place and provide some details…
Brad Burnham of Union Square Ventures makes a good case in his recent post about the economics of social media… gibes with what we’ve been saying about Front Porch Forum for some time…
My frustration with the debate about Free is that it seems like a last ditch effort to fit the internet economy into the familiar framework of the industrial economy. That isn’t going to work. Free is not a pricing strategy, a marketing strategy, or the inevitable consequence of a market with low variable costs. It’s a symptom of a much more fundamental economic shift. Until we agree on what resources are scarce and have a framework for how they will be allocated in the future we are not just talking past each other, we are talking about the wrong things…
…in an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients…
In a world where the scarce resource is some combination of time, attention, relevance and insight, those commodities become the medium of exchange in a parallel economy alongside traditional currencies…
The much more interesting conversation is about the appropriate economic model for a social network that depends on the contributions of its participants and increases in value as more people use it. One possibility is that the economic models of these networks will look more like Craigslist than Yahoo. Recent estimates peg Craigslist’s revenue at more than $100,000,000. Not much compared to Yahoo’s billions, but Craigslist still employs only 28 people. Even allowing for substantial bandwidth, and server costs, it is still hard to imagine how their costs are more than $5,000,000. Since Craigslist collapsed a multibillion dollar classified advertising business into a fabulously profitable $100,000,000 business, perhaps we should be talking about the potential deflationary impact of more “zero billion dollar” businesses. As the radical efficiencies of the web seep into more sectors of the economy, and participants in social networks exchange attention instead of dollars, will governments at all levels need to make do with less tax revenue?
Of course, the other “currency” of social media is the posting. Web 2.0 sites must attract people who post and people who pay attention. Then earn dollars around that. But you’ve gotta have both readers/viewers and content contributors… often two very different beasts.
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