The Kelsey Group reported today…
LiveDeal announced that it will integrate community discussion boards to its classifieds engine.
Seems a new mom-focused social networking website pops up every week lately. I know Gannett has one in our area through it’s newspaper. And a grocery vertical I learned about recently is providing its client grocery store chains with just such a tool. I’ve heard good things in the past about the DC Moms Yahoo Group. Now today from Greg Sterling…
Mom-oriented social network CafeMom just received $5 million in funding and BabyCenter, which I just wrote about, relaunched the site with many more social media features.
Women and moms are are the intersection of a number of important online phenomena, including social media and commerce. They are the most influence and important audience when it comes to transactions.
Front Porch Forum‘s approach is to help mom’s in a neighborhood get to know one another so that they can then talk in person, form toddler playgroups, babysitting coops, etc. And plenty use their FPF neighborhood forum for direct “looking for a babysitter” or “stroller for sale” type postings. Since most mom sites are about connecting with strangers, why not do the same with a group in your own area? And actually get to know them… in (gasp!) person? And no need to limit it to just females… I love taking our little ones to the neighborhood playgroup.
The Kelsey Group reports today…
Peter Horan, CEO of IAC Media & Advertising, gave a speech entitled, “What’s Local ReallyAbout?” He said that we are “now in the second decade of local: So much promise. So much logic. So little progress. How come?” His answer was that we are in the age of Internet-driven media where local isn’t about reading, it’s about doing.
Peter told the audience that the litmus test for local is usefulness, but he went on to describe the issue that has been facing city sites since they evolved from being mere bulletin boards hosted by a techie in a community. He called this the Grand Canyon of local – the trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness. Few media are able to bridge this gap. In order to keep costs down, city sites need self-service, low cost of sales and abundant promotional coverage at very low prices. But to meet the needs of consumers and advertisers, they require such high-expense items as a strong sales force, unique content and broad market coverage. Under Peter’s leadership, Citysearch is well on its way.
I read this to mean that few local websites have figured out how to continually crank out enough quality content to attract a sizable audience while keeping expenses in check.
Our early findings indicate that Front Porch Forum may well be an engine that can drive a local site. We have tremendous traffic (nearly 25% of our pilot city subscribe… word of mouth) and people love it. They go door-to-door to recruit their neighbors. The expense of moderating the neighborhood conversations is modest, but not the web 2.0 dream of zero… nor should it be. Plenty of other local online services could be hung on FPF as the core… it’s what people come back to weekly, even daily.
Professor Keith Hampton‘s research about neighborhood email lists seems to support this.
Jason Fry, in reviewing FloorPlanner.com in the Wall Street Journal, concludes with…
The Net makes exploring the world and engaging with it easy in a way we’re only just getting used to. Within a few keystrokes, you can be digging into the news, indulging your curiosity, or foundering in an obsession or addiction. Practically speaking, you can communicate with most anyone you wish whenever you wish. And you can do so at a remove — step away from the PC, or just hit the back button, and your engagement ends.
That remove can be a wonderful thing. It lets us indulge our curiosity almost as quickly as we can think, makes it easy to drop a line to someone we might not feel like we have time to call on the phone and allows us to be part of a community that may be too diffuse for real-world interaction.
The danger is that interacting at a remove can come to seem preferable to the messiness of the real world, where a greater commitment is required and interaction demands more of ourselves than it does in our compartmentalized worlds of browsers and digital personas…
David Weinberger pointed out this passage in his blog posting today, and talks about the value of “what if-ing” via the web. My first thoughts go a different way… Some would argue that too many people are checking out of their local reality to spend time in virtual worlds online, television fantasy and the like. It’s one thing that makes Front Porch Forum such a different experience for people… FPF draws you into your local scene… people become more involved with the neighbors and community around them through the service.
Julia Lerman touched on this when she rates FPF vs. Facebook and the like from her global software development perspective.
Municipal libraries are a cornerstone of local America. While they’ve been hit hard by budget cuts in many locales, they continue to play vital roles. So I was pleased to see Front Porch Forum treated well today by Charles at Dewey and Main.
Many small town librarians participate on the FPF neighborhood forums in their towns. They post announcements about programs and new books, as well as address specific issues that come up in the various neighborhoods. And, I would guess, they learn a bit about what’s going on around town and use that information to shape what they provide.
Here’s a thought… “Local Online” efforts come in two flavors… those provided by locals vs. not. Local-local includes bloggers, local citizen journalism sites, neighborhood websites, community newspaper sites, and lots more. Outsider-local includes national offerings in yellow pages, mapping, search, classifieds, and a quickly growing number of offerings… peer reviews, database mashups, etc.
Both local-local and outsider-local bring value, of course, but outsider-local often lack authenticity. Some of that can be made up with large doses of user-generated content, but still…
Yelvington.com’s post today approaches this point today in discussing regional newspapers vs. those operating at the community level. In our area, the Gannett daily is now putting out suburban weeklies with recycled content from the past week’s regional paper. All the communities served by these new weeklies also have well-established community newspapers. There’s no confusing the two. One is local-local.
Certain national efforts, like craigslist, feel local-local in some locations, but not so much in others. Front Porch Forum is local-local in its pilot area. This suggests a litmus test for local online services. Which national efforts will be able to come across as local-local and thereby more authentic? Which one-city local sites will make the most of their homefield advantage as the heavyweights lumber into town… into every town?
“Neighborhood” seems to be heating up in the online world. Every week brings word of some new service aimed at the neighborhood level. Here’s the latest to come to my attention… Nayburz in Denver.
The site offers forums, classifieds, restaurant menus, etc. What seems different is the ability to define your geographic “bubble” on the fly across these different functions. This may prove an appealing approach for web-centric folks.
I’ve been wanting to write about David Weinberger‘s Everything is Miscellaneous vis-a-vis Front Porch Forum since I had the pleasure of meeting him at a Berkman Center-Sunlight Foundation conference at Harvard earlier this year… so today’s the day.
The reason for my delay in writing is that I’ve been hoping to actually read the book(!), but it hasn’t happened yet. However I have digested enough reviews to be in receipt of the gist. From Amazon.com…
Human beings are information omnivores: we are constantly collecting, labeling, and organizing data. But today, the shift from the physical to the digital is mixing, burning, and ripping our lives apart. In the past, everything had its one place–the physical world demanded it–but now everything has its places: multiple categories, multiple shelves. Simply put, everything is suddenly miscellaneous.
In Everything Is Miscellaneous, David Weinberger charts the new principles of digital order that are remaking business, education, politics, science, and culture. In his rollicking tour of the rise of the miscellaneous, he examines why the Dewey decimal system is stretched to the breaking point, how Rand McNally decides what information not to include in a physical map (and why Google Earth is winning that battle), how Staples stores emulate online shopping to increase sales, why your children’s teachers will stop having them memorize facts, and how the shift to digital music stands as the model for the future in virtually every industry. Finally, he shows how by “going miscellaneous,” anyone can reap rewards from the deluge of information in modern work and life.
My take on David’s thesis is that trying to make one order out of “everything” is hopeless and not even especially useful. Better to tag everything and search anew every time you want to get at something. (Brings to mind huge filing projects in the pre-web days… I remember filling out cross-reference cards and placing them throughout the file cabinets… arghhhhh.)
So I’ve seen with Front Porch Forum. In our pilot city, more than 20% subscribe, each person belonging to their neighborhood’s forum. People post messages for their neighbors about babysitters, lost cats, restaurant reviews, plumber referrals, school tax debate, car break-in, moose sightings, school fundraiser, car for sale and on and on.
A few members have expressed frustration that all these messages aren’t neatly ordered into threads. Or that we don’t offer one part of the site focused on contractor reviews, another area on classified ads, another part for political debate.
Instead, each neighborhood forum publishes a single issue every few days with whatever postings the neighborhood has generated. Each message is clearly labeled. Current and past issues, a mishmash of subjects, may be browsed or searched by keyword, author, street, etc.
I don’t think caging this information into various compartments will serve anyone well. It’s all about the conversation… not order. FPF’s aim is to help neighbors connect and foster community within the neighborhood… not create a Dewey Decimal System at the neighborhood level.
Which brings me to much of web 2.0. Whether it’s real estate, reviews, classifieds, directions, discussion… whatever, many FPF members have reported that they would rather just search their neighborhood’s archive for what they need (and come across other interesting tidbits) or post a brief note to a couple hundred nearby households… rather that then go to one of the burgeoning number of these specialty sites.
Put another way, David argues that many web 2.0 sites free information and make it accessible in many ways. But these examples are still in verticals, such as real estate. So the information is constrained, although it’s accessible to everyone.
Front Porch Forum removes all subject constraint and instead limits who can participate… only residents of a given neighborhood.
For what it’s worth.
Just learned of Neighborrow.com. Seems focused on NYC apartment buildings. Neighbors join and offer to loan stuff to each other, and make requests. Website is up. Featured groups have a couple dozen or fewer members. It has a young feel (don’t borrow from anyone over 30?) and has some plumb media coverage… Grist article and MSNBC interview.
Our neighborhood has a manual version of this. Erik maintains a list of items people are willing to loan. I think he invited several neighbors into the group. Everyone gets the spreadsheet. Need an extra sleeping pad for this weekend’s camping trip? Check the list and make a call. Simple. However, not heavily used either.
This kind of thing seems to happen spontaneously through Front Porch Forum more… “hey, anyone out there have a sleeping pad we can borrow for this weekend?” That would likely get several responses from our nearby neighbors, who may or may not be on Erik’s list. Kind of “just in time” stuff-to-loan. And no database to keep up to date.
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