Category Archives: Social Media
Silicon Valley Echo
Amen to this. From Kara Swisher at Wall Street Journal’s All Things Digital…
I conducted a little experiment among the more than 100 folks gathered for the wedding, all of whom were quite intelligent, armed with all kinds of the latest devices (many, many people had iPhones, for example) and not sluggish about technology.
They were also made up of a wide range of ages and genders, from kids to seniors.
And so I asked a large group of people–about 30–and here is the grand total who knew what Twitter was: 0
FriendFeed: 0
Widget: 1 (but she thought it was one of the units used in a business class study).
Facebook: Everyone I asked knew about it and about half had an account, although different people used it differently.
In other words, confirming for me what I wrote last week about the intense obsession with the hottest new services like Twitter and FriendFeed, in the echo chamber of Silicon Valley, and how no one else cares yet.
And from MeetUp.com‘s Scott Heiferman…
Making a householdword is the great challenge. Not only does the word need to be universally known, but it has to be universally known for something that people need. eBay, Amazon, Google, and Craigslist are universally known, and people need what those words mean: People need to buy & sell & search in their everyday lives… As for Facebook, people need to stay in touch with people they know, so they’re on-track, but I suspect their word is too muddied with pokes & kid stuff.
About 30% of our pilot city subscribe to Front Porch Forum and many more than that have heard of and/or plan to sign up for our service. Many people appreciate help in connecting with their neighbors and plugging into their neighborhood.
Building Community in an e-State
Vermont is working to become the first “e-State” with availability of broadband internet and cell phone coverage across 100% of the state… by 2010. The “100% of the state” bit is ambitious and lots of people, organizations are businesses and contributing toward the realization of this goal.
The State of Vermont justifies this ambition saying it will be good for economic development, healthcare, education, public safety and more. And part of the “and more” usually includes a vague reference to the e-State being good for society and civic engagement. Can the internet and cell phones enhance the sense of community in a town? Many people feel these tools actually turn people’s attention away from local community.
The Snelling Center is stepping in to address this issue with a one-day event on May 29, 2008…
Explore public policy issues, opportunities, and potential obstacles that will arise as Vermont becomes fully connected.
- How might civic life change in a fully connected state?
- How will we master emerging technologies so they unite us and strengthen communities?
- How will we address issues of privacy, equity, resistance to change, ownership, and cost?
- How will local and state governmental units ensure that all citizens have equal access to information and participation?
Details, agenda, and registration.
The keynote speaker will be Lewis Feldstein, Co-Author of Better Together, which he wrote with Bowling Alone author, Robert Putnam. Putnam will be speaking at UVM on April 28, 2008.
Voters flocking to Make It Your Own Awards
More and more people are voting online in the Make It Your Own Awards… hopefully lots of them casting one vote for Front Porch Forum. If you tried and the site failed, please try again using this simpler voting site.
More comments from voters…
- “I voted. IT was a great site! A lot of really COOL stuff folks are doing. (They wouldn’t let me just vote for FPF – I tried! They REQUIRED I select three other orgz. So, of course I got sucked into investigating carefully the merits of each of the other props!! I actually downloaded 2 proposals from organizations from the site as a template to help me with mine that I’m writing!” -Rolla, innercity Baltimore school teacher
- “I support Front Porch Forum because it brings local neighborhoods together. It allows people to communicate with their fellow neighbors quickly and conveniently.” -Tom in Vermont
- “I’ve connected and been connected to such vital information for my city and neighborhood.” -Lisa speaking about Front Porch Forum in Vermont
Craigslist bandits strip man’s home
Craigslist is a force of nature, an amazing thing. So is a tornado and a virtual funnel cloud hit Robert Salisbury in Oregon recently when someone posted a bogus ad on the local Craigslist saying he had suddenly moved away and everything on his property was free for the taking… even his horse.
As he drove toward his place he stopped multiple vehicles laden with his stuff and asked for it back… “no way” was the response. “Craigslist said it was free… end of discussion.” He’s working with the police and lawyers to sort through the aftermath now. As the Seattle Times reports…
Meanwhile, Salisbury could not even relax on his porch swing.
Someone took it.
This amazing tale illustrates one of many risks associated with using anonymous online services.
Front Porch Forum, on the other hand, is limited to conversation among clearly identified nearby neighbors.
Vote for us today! And please spread the word about the Case Foundation funding contest.
Clift looking for small town UGC
Steven Clift writes a good post today at PBS.org…
While the new EveryBlock.com site uses maps to display aggregated content for three major cities and Outside.in gets local with select geotagging blogs in a number of high population areas, I am looking for tools that display organic “user-generated” content via maps that get out of urban areas and into small town America.
As part of E-Democracy.Org’s Rural Voices project in Minnesota we seek to discover bloggers, social networking groups, wikis, online community forums, etc. from rural/Greater Minnesota. This map of 200 blogs aggregated by MNSpeak, shows just three outside the Twin Cities metropolitan area. This doesn’t seem very democratizing. Our goal is to connect these rural citizen media producers and bring them to workshops across the state.
Has anyone out there seen anything that combines say recent post data in Google Blog Search or Technorati and displays it as a daily/weekly/monthly “heat map” of sorts?
I’ve stumbled across a number of sites like Flickrvision and its cousin Twittervision which show real-time geo-tagged content. Panoramio shows photos from Google Earth. Placeopedia and WikiMapia are trying to get people to manually link place-based Wikipedia pages to maps. My friends with Placeblogger allow you to search by place, but I don’t want to type in village after village. The best site I’ve found that seems to get, is FindNearBy.Net which maps Craiglist and EBay sale items.
All in all, touristic rural areas do pretty well with photos online, but finding blogs/blog posts, video, wiki pages, online forums without highly focused geographic term searches seems near impossible. Can anyone help me out? Show me the map of my dreams.
Steven Clift
E-Democracy.OrgP.S. We are using the Del.icio.us tag mnvoices to tag Web 2.0 drive rural/Greater Minnesota sites that we find and will be adding the best sites we find to our wiki.
Yelp Expansion Plans
Mike Boland writes today about Yelp, including…
The company is moving in some interesting directions and the $15 million it just received will provide the fuel. Much of it will be put towards sales & marketing to seed reviews activity and bring in SMB advertisers. Its 10 person sales office in New York City is the first such move and will be staffed with new and existing inside sales reps.
To clarify a point made in the last post, most of the company’s efforts to generate new reviews involve moving into new cites, rather than into new categories. Categories, according to Stoppleman, have to happen naturally and the company takes a hands off approach when it comes to the direction of the content. It’s geographical expansion plan also interestingly takes a stepping stone approach that branches out from existing cities and take advantage of the word of mouth and cross pollination of people between nearby cites like L.A., San Diego and San Francisco, in order to organically grow its branding and base of reviews.
Not trying to steer content makes sense. As does the “stepping stones” expansion approach.
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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