Category Archives: Social Media
Online tools to help local communities
Matt, on the LocalMouth blog, writes recently…
Personally, I think there’s great potential for simple online tools to bring local communities more closely together. It may be a struggle at the start to get together a critical mass of neighbours, and it may need a liberal dash of coaxing, but once you’ve got the ball rolling, people’s natural desire to communicate with others should take care of the rest. Good stuff will happen. ‘Good’ won’t always mean that people get along well or that arguments won’t take place. Far from it. When people are talking about stuff that matters, conversations are bound to get heated at times, and that’s where the delicate job of moderation comes in. But generally, I think, more communication between local people can be a very positive thing.
Right on! He goes on to list several UK websites that each focus in a different way on their local community… and Front Porch Forum.
I look forward to checking out the local sites he mentions. Thanks Matt!
Options for online neighborhood tools
I’m frequently approached by folks interested in Front Porch Forum for their neighborhood. If they live in our pilot service area (Chittenden County, VT), they are welcome to join. If not, then they can add their community to our waiting list.
But often people ask what steps they can take now and I offer some simple alternatives. Well, I just found a succinct post that I’ll direct these inquiries to in the future from Matt on the UK LocalMouth blog. He offers just enough detail to help the curious get started about a neighborhood…
- Blog
- Social network
- Bulletin board
- Group
- Content management system
And Front Porch Forum would be yet another type of option, where available.
State Rep. Uses Front Porch Forum to call for Boycott
Matt Ryan reported for the Burlington Free Press today…
Vermont campaign signs along Vermont 15 in front of the Essex Junction Shopping Center have prompted a departing state legislator to call on citizens to boycott businesses within the center — even though the businesses’ managers said they had nothing to do with the signs.
Rep. Peter Hunt, a Democrat from Essex Junction, wrote in a post on Front Porch Forum on Oct. 17 that he would stop shopping at Aubuchon Hardware, Rite Aid Pharmacy, Sherwin-Williams, Quality Bake Shop or “any of the individual store (sic) who have taken this political stance as long as they have these signs on Pearl Street.”
“I am disappointed that these business (sic) have chosen to a (sic) political stance to support candidates from one party,” Hunt wrote. “This is completely out of line.”
He concluded with, “I hope all of you will also shop in other stores.”
More than a dozen FPF subscribers have responded on our service, none in agreement with Rep. Hunt’s call.
Knight News Challenge 2009!
The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation is opening up the third round of its News Challenge.
We’re giving away around $5 million in 2009 for the development and distribution of neighborhood and community-focused projects, services, and programs.
If you have a great idea that will improve local online news, deepen community engagement, bring Web 2.0 tools to local neighborhoods, develop publishing platforms and standards to support local conversations or innovate how we visualize, experience or interact with information, we’d like to see it! You have the opportunity to win funding for your project and support within a vibrant community of media, tech, and community-oriented people who want to improve the world.
Deadline Nov. 1, 2008. The good folks at Knight have a hand in so many great projects that it’s tough to keep track. We’ll be submitting an application to take Front Porch Forum to the next level… the two paragraphs above describe FPF to a tee. We were honored previously this year to be involved in a couple Knight initiatives.
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Pay-per-post comes to Angie’s List?
Peter Krasilovsky reports today…
Getting people to submit reviews is hard. We’ve seen incentives such as $5 coffee cards (a lot), $10 gas cards, and direct donations to charity (InsiderPages‘ current model)…
This month, Angie’s List, a paid service founded in 1995 that counts 650,000 members… launches a review campaign with the biggest review incentive we’ve seen yet: a free Flip video camera for 15 submissions. The camera is worth about $120. Reviewers also get entered into a $5,000 sweepstakes.
The twist is that all 15 reviews must be for local services, and three of the submissions must be for Angie’s new medical category. The reports on Angie’s List aren’t likely to be rushed affairs, since each one follows a template with six questions — and your name is on it.
Whether you call them the “Three Ms” – members, messages and moolah – or the “Three Cs” – community, content and cash – one of the three critical elements to any Web 2.0 site is “user generated content.” Those with the magic attract content, while others pay for it. Some people get bent out of shape about this kind of thing… see it as a sin against all things webby and wonderful. Not me.
Angie’s List is an established successful big business. They charge people to participate and now they pay people in certain cases to write their reviews. This seems similar to the business of publishing as we’ve always known it… a publisher pays a writer to write and then sells the writing to readers for a fee.
Front Porch Forum does not charge its members to participate… to read or to write… although we have given away a few donated ball game tickets and gift certificates in raffles among members who posted recently. Who knows what the future will bring?
I think we’ll see more and more experiments among Web 2.0 sites to capture a greater share of the three Cs. Or is it the “Three Rs?” Readers, ‘riters, and revenue. Gotta have lots of all three!
UPDATE: Andrew Shotland chimed in too.
Challenging Conventional Web 2.0 Wisdom
A friend jokingly refers to Front Porch Forum as the “anti-internet” and he got me thinking. I ended up with the chart below comparing conventional wisdom for much of “Web 2.0” vs. FPF.
FYI, Front Porch Forum hosts networks of online neighborhood forums that blanket metro areas. In our Chittenden County, VT, pilot, 11,000 households subscribe, including one-third of Burlington. People connect with neighbors and build community through the exchange of postings among clearly identified nearby neighbors.
So, Peter Kafka got me thinking more with his post on Silicon Alley Insider the other day, in particular this gem…
It’s counterintuitive, but during an up cycle people accept conventional wisdom, and during a down cycle people challenge it. That’s good. Very good. And the cycle will winnow competition.
Well… an upside to our economic crisis! A year ago during good times a few Web 2.0 experts took a look at Front Porch Forum and each, in his way, told us that we needed to get in line and look more like the left column above. And just in the past week I’ve heard from some folks in the same crowd and they’re showing up with open minds and probing questions.
Riding the adoption bell curve
A posting on TechCrunch came with this nifty illustration about adoption of new online services the other day…
… customers and word-of-mouth referrals travel from left to right along a bell curve that starts with Innovators and Early Adopters, peaks with the Early Majority and the Late Majority, and finally permeates with reaction from Laggards.
If I read this right, the author is claiming that Digg and Twitter have about 16% market penetration. In a previous posting here, it was noted that Digg has 30 million monthly visitors, with 3 million of them registered users. Considering just the U.S. population (300 million), wouldn’t that put Digg between 1% and 10% penetration? That is, still far from moving out of the Early Adopter range?
Nearly 20% of our pilot area subscribes to Front Porch Forum, including 33% of Burlington and better than 90% of our leading neighborhoods. That puts the bulk of our service in the Early Majority area, with our best neighborhoods pushing through the Late Majority and into the Laggards.
Web 2.0 for the rest of us?
reports today on CNET News…
LONDON–Digg founder Kevin Rose had a message for the audience at the Future of Web Apps conference on Thursday: It’s time to grow up.
“We have to do better,” he said in his talk, called “The Future of News,” and said that it’s time for the social news site that he founded in 2004 to to expand beyond the geek set and get some real-world relevance. “Why click a button and make the number go up by one? Why does that matter?”
Digg, after all, gets more than 30 million monthly visitors, but Rose said that the site only has slightly over three million registered user accounts–those are the people actually “Digging.” That indirectly confirmed what Digg critics hve been saying all along: that it’s reflective of only a tiny and vocal subset of the Web, resulting in a heavy bias toward anything iPhone, anything Linux, anything Barack Obama, and plenty of wacky local news stories.
I’ve been fortunate to speak to many groups over the past year or so, and I frequently survey each crowd about technology and services that they’ve (1) heard of, and (2) use. Routinely, only one or two hands will go up for Twitter, RSS, LinkedIn, Digg, Flickr, Delicious, etc. to my first question. But almost no one ever admits to using these tech media darlings. Meanwhile, it’s not unusual in talks with local groups within our pilot area to have half of the hands reaching for the ceiling when I ask about Front Porch Forum.
Kevin Rose’s call above seems on target to me. When you offer a service globally, it’s not outrageous to find a million tech professionals and hobbyists to jump on board. But try raising an online crowd within a local community… especially one that stays plugged in over time… very difficult.
In our pilot area, more than 11,000 households subscribe to Front Porch Forum, including one-third of Burlington, VT. We have people in their 80s using FPF. I spoke with a homeless person the other day who’s on board. College students love FPF. And we have droves of non-techie grown-ups… folks who are too busy with their lives to look into why they should tweet or digg. Busy or not, they do know that Front Porch Forum is the place to turn to borrow a couple saw horses, find a babysitter, recommend a roofer, learn about a rash of break-ins, give away their couch, buy a bike, hear from their school board member about the budget, etc.
I’m looking forward to more online offerings aimed at the rest of us… not just the heavy tech consumers. Of course, it’s tough for the traditional and new media, as well as funders, not to be dazzled by shiny bells and whistles, especially when these sites attract a sizable group of early adopters from the global masses. This top-down approach has worked incredibly well for Google and a host of others. And it will continue to draw most of the media spotlight and funding.
I’m eager to see more efforts coming from the other direction — the grassroots on up and out — such as we’re doing with Front Porch Forum… the Craigslist and Angieslist approach. That is, get traction in one metro area, then spread to others.
New Media Guru in Vermont Oct. 4
New media thinker and do-er Dan Gillmor will speak at the UVM Center for Rural Studies 30th anniversary bash on October 4, 2008 starting at 5:00 PM. I’ve been fortunate to hear Dan speak and follow his online writing for the past couple years… great stuff. And now he’s leading the newly formed Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Front Porch Forum is tickled pink to be involved (albeit in a small way). Come to the conference all day… or at least catch Dan’s talk at 5:00 PM and the panel he’ll moderate after that.
-Author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People (2004; O’Reilly Media)
-Director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
-Director of the Center for Citizen MediaAt the newly created Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Dan Gillmor is working to help create a culture of innovation and risk-taking in journalism education, and in the wider media world. He is founder and current director of the Center for Citizen Media and previously founded Grassroots Media, Inc. From 1994-2004, Gillmor was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Vermont (’81), Gillmor received a Herbert Davenport fellowship in 1982 for economics and business reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. During the 1986-87 academic year he was a journalism fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied history, political theory and economics. He has won or shared in several regional and national journalism awards. Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.
And I seem to recall some former Vermont professional connection of his. Hmm…
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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