Category Archives: Social Media
BeLocal: citizen empowerment through digital media
Kevin Harris blogs today…
“I’m involved in a new initiative to try and help maximise the potential of digital media for community engagement. In recent weeks I’ve been working with Simon Grice, Steven Feldman and Hugh Flouch (Harringay Online) to set up BeLocal Consulting, starting with a series of workshops. Here’s the blurb:
“BeLocal Consulting contributes to the community empowerment agenda by helping local authorities, community groups and citizens to exploit digital media around community issues.
“With a combination of expertise in community development, new media and service management, we help local authorities through the following process:
- Understanding the issues
- Establishing partnerships and building a strategy
- Supporting implementation of the strategy
- Assessment and review.”
“Now is the time for experiments” -Clay Shirky
Clay Shirky’s much blogged about essay about newspapers is — surprising for a topic so over analyzed — fresh and mind-opening…
… there is one possible answer to the question “If the old model is broken, what will work in its place?” The answer is: Nothing will work, but everything might. Now is the time for experiments, lots and lots of experiments, each of which will seem as minor at launch as craigslist did, as Wikipedia did, as octavo volumes did.
Journalism has always been subsidized. Sometimes it’s been Wal-Mart and the kid with the bike. Sometimes it’s been Richard Mellon Scaife. Increasingly, it’s you and me, donating our time. The list of models that are obviously working today, like Consumer Reports and NPR, like ProPublica and WikiLeaks, can’t be expanded to cover any general case, but then nothing is going to cover the general case.
It’s a thrill to be deeply involved in one such experiment… Front Porch Forum.
On 99-cent iFarts and progress
From MeetUp.com‘s Scott Heiferman’s blog…
@JoeTrippi: “I live in a world in which BILLIONS of people live on less than $2 a day yet many of us will pay 99 cents for an IPhone app that makes our phone fart. But I don’t write this out of guilt or to guilt you. Its just a fact that I find really strange… I am not much of an idealist any more — at least not in the way I considered myself an idealist before I found my way to Africa last year — but I still believe in the power of people conducting simple acts together for the purpose of achieving what is right.”
That’s my approach to Front Porch Forum. It’s not single-handedly finding a cure for AIDS or reversing global climate change… but it is connecting neighbors and leading to increased civic engagement. And there’s something profound about helping humanize the guy next door, while directing people’s attention to local issues, conversations and actions.
NY Times moving into Neighborhood Blogs
Looks like the New York Times is moving into the neighborhood-online world, according to this post…
The New York Times (NYT) will experiment with hyperlocal blogs, starting with two next Monday, Brownstoner reports
. Each site will be led by a NYT journalist, but the paper will also use free neighborhood contributors and will work with CUNY journalism students…
The Times will effectively be competing with a slew of neighborhood blogs, aggregators like Outside.in
So, Front Porch Forum welcomes the Grey Lady into our online space!
Local online is about local offline
From Greg Sterling today…
Here’s a general article on the local market from Business Week. Many people have seen it and emailed me about it.
It bothers me because it’s pretty superficial…
Here’s the reality, which BW either doesn’t fully “get” or seem to want to explore in sufficient depth:
- Local is about offline — money spent in physical places.
- E-commerce is <4% of retail; 95%+ percent of product purchases happen offline. Increasingly those purchases start online.
- 99%+ of service business transactions happen offline/locally (yet online is the place where more and more people go to find service businesses).
- People may communicate via Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook to others around the globe but they live in physical places and when they travel they’re also in physical places, where they stay, eat, shop.
- SMB advertiser acquisition is hard, yes — no dispute there (see the last two years of blog posts)
- The central barrier to more geotargeted and local advertising by nationals has been the challenges of offline tracking in any given campaign
FreeCycle Rolls its Own
Looks like FreeCycle has built its own software after many years operating through Yahoo Groups. Check out this international web service at My Free Cycle.
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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