Category Archives: Social Media
The Social Network that stops Traffic!
I’ve poked around various social networking sites and some impress with a feeling of community among distant strangers, others with sheer size or whiz-bang technology. But I’ve never seen anything that elicits the reaction that we’re seeing to Front Porch Forum in the neighborhoods where it’s really caught on in this corner of Vermont.
The other day as a I walked along the sidewalk in downtown Burlington, a woman drove past and did a double take. Break lights… she jumped out and ran over to give me a hug… “you’re the forum guy, right?!?!” Her car door hung open and the guy in the Audi behind her started fuming. Her house had burned the week before and her neighbors had rallied around her and her kids through Front Porch Forum. We kept it short and traffic resumed.
Not the first time we’ve seen neighbors pulling together to help one of their own, nor the first public tears of appreciation I’ve witnessed. People are genuinely moved when they connect with the people who live around them… when a degree of isolation is broken through.
And today from a different person we heard:
Front Porch Forum has connected us to our neighbors and the community quickly and profoundly. We’ve been in Burlington only nine months but because of the forum we feel that we know our neighbors, even if we haven’t actually met all of them. And when we have questions or information to share, it’s an easy, friendly way to get answers or help and share what we know with other people. Our experience of Burlington is so intimately tied up with Front Porch Forum at this point that they go together in our minds. Burlington = Front Porch Forum = community = connection = Burlington. L.D., Five Sisters Neighborhood Forum
Yahoo’s take on Local Online
Peter Krasilovsky reports today about Yahoo Exec VP Hilary Schneider’s keynote at the Kelsey Local ’07 conference this week. Schneider…
emphasized that the company is really zeroing in on local to play a major role in Yahoo’s growth plans. Local search’s share of overall search within Yahoo went from 11 percent to 14 percent in 2006, and local search itself grew 28 percent in the last four months, per ComScore.
Yahoo divides local as:
- Maps – 32M unique visitors
- News and info – 30M
- Social media – 20M
- Classifieds – 20M
- Directory – 18M
Further:
Yahoo Local itself is pretty well built out, with 6,000 city pages and 80,000 zip codes. But it only has 600 neighborhoods. “There are obviously many more than that,” says Schneider. “ We have a long way to go.”
Yahoo looks at the local market as:
- National local – 17,000 businesses spending $22.4 billion in ad dollars
- Regional local – 85,000 businesses spending $48.3 billion
- Local local – 22,000,000 businesses spending $33.6 billion
Where there’s folk, there’s fire
That title is a clever quote from Britt Blaser’s latest post. Thanks to David Weinberger for pointing in that direction. Blaser writes:
The People Law trumps the Power Law. There are five principles I’m playing with lately:
1. The size of your audience confers limited power
2. A network’s value is the square of its nodes (Metcalfe)
3. Network nodes are significant only when they’re verbose
4. Most conversation is among nearby nodes
5. Only interactions count, and the richest count most
I recommend a visit to check out the charts and graphs and his detail… good stuff. Most of these points jibe with what we’re finding with Front Porch Forum. E.g., under point three he states that the purpose of online social networking is face-to-face interaction. That’s what Front Porch Forum is all about… and it works because the people on the online network by definition live in the same neighborhood.
Big Local Online Event… any Locals onhand?
Looks like a great event shaping up next week… all about local online: DRILLING DOWN ON LOCAL ’07 – The Annual Silicon Valley Summit. Organizer Peter Krasilovsky blogs about it here. Most of the mainstream heavy hitters appear to be on the agenda. I wonder how many locally based entities will attend and/or speak vs. national and global efforts that deliver “local” from afar?
Put another way, how much “local online” is delivered by local business (and other entities)? Might be an interesting question for the good folks at the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and my friend and author Michael Shuman (Going Local, The Small-Mart Revolution).
Regardless, I wish I could be there next week… sounds like a powerful conference.
Social Networks squeeze NGOs?
David Wilcox writes from London this week about how nonprofits, associations and trade unions are surrendering ground to social networking websites. Reminds me of online citizen journalism taking a bite out of newspapers. Wilcox:
It used to be that you joined associations because it was a way of meeting like-minded people and getting help, facilities, information and other things difficult or costly to organise for yourself. These days it is much easier to find people and resources online, and to mix and match these assets into project teams, communities of practice, and informal networks.
Further, he cites a forthcoming report from the NCVO ICT Foresight team:
The connections that ICT facilitates suggest that some organisations may increasingly be bypassed and that power may shift away from top-down hierarchical organisations and towards more fluid and participative networks where there is less need for a centralised ‘bricks and mortar’ coordinating organisation.
Leon Benjamin, author of Winning by Sharing, is even more explicit:
I think the problem is leadership. The reality is that leaders of VCOs and NGOs aren’t equipped to lead in the 21st century’s networked economy. And this isn’t their fault, but they need to accept help from people who can create the conditions that enable leaders to emerge, and then step aside. This isn’t their time now.
Just before he died, Peter Drucker said at Davos in Switzerland, “community-building talent is the single most precious resource in the modern world.” Let me briefly explain why.
Online community service poviders like Ezboard and CommunityZero, and Bebo and MySpace, to a certain extent have created leaders who in some cases, have literally started movements, with huge numbers of supporters and advocates. EzBoard has over half a million discrete ‘clubs’, each with a leader, covering a vast array of subject matter. These leaders often deliver an experience that enriches people’s social and professional lives. More so than the associations and unions that are supposed to serve them. These are our leaders of the future.
Smalltown and i-neighbors going places
Smalltown.com landed $3M in new funds recently to ramp up it’s model of local online. Peter Krasilovsky reports:
Smalltown [is] an IYP site with social aspects via reviews, calendars and (now) Top 10 lists. Five months after launching SME-oriented sites in San Mateo and Burlingame, Smalltown has announced three new Bay Area locales, added video uploads, hired a VP of Sales, and begun a Google campaign.
This is a very interesting effort:
Usage-wise, Rucker says he’s got 3.5 percent of the launched communities visiting on a weekly basis. About 1.8 percent have registered, which gives them the right to review sites, etc. Rucker is aiming for a registered base of three percent.
After six months, Front Porch Forum has about 17% of Burlington, VT registered.
And I just heard that i-neighbors has a new version of their service up and running, although I don’t have any details.
Monthly Sampler: Neighborhood Poker Game
So I tried listing a week’s worth of message titles a couple times (here and here), and now a month and nearly 2,000 new messages have slipped by… too many to list. Let’s go with some samples of what Front Porch Forum members wrote in February:
Let’s get a neighborhood poker game started in the King Maple area of Burlington.- Dog lost in the big box parking lots. Dog found!
- Did anyone else’s propane price go up nearly 50% last month in Hinesburg?
- Warm maple-cinnamon buns delivered to your Charlotte home for school fundraiser.
- New baby coming and hand-me-downs needed in the Five Sisters.
- Lots of ideas discussed for underutilized corner store space on St. Paul Street.
- Neighbors stepping up to reclaim ailing pocket park at S. Winooski and St. Paul.
- Seeking kombucha tea culture… I have no idea what this is.
- Snowpants needed for Somali Bantu kids sledding this week.
- Details of emergencies sent to specific neighborhoods from Burlington Fire Department.
- Discussion about changing Barlow Street to one-way in Winooski.
- Intervale car break-ins reported and discussed.
- South End car ransacker nabbed; police ask forum members to reclaim recovered loot.
- The usual array of housing, cars, furniture, contractor, etc. postings.
- Free couch, iMac, printers, linens, baby stuff, desk, slip cover, ficus plant, misc. electronics, etc.
- Lots of discussions about broadband and TV options across the county.
- Lots of Town Meeting lead-up announcements and opinions.
- Lots and lots snow-related requests, offers, complaints and thanks.
- Oh… and there’s always cats. This month’s tip… look under your porch after a blizzard. Several folks found snowed-in kitties eager to get out, get fed and get warm!
Build Igloo for Chocolate… before it’s too late!
A group of Lakeside Neighborhood Forum members in Burlington’s South End recently formed the Lakeside Climate Club… or something to that effect. They gather to take a hard look at global climate change and discuss a personal and neighborhood response.
But this group isn’t letting a little cataclysmic manmade disaster get in the way of some fun. Witness their first action… a neighborhood igloo building contest… “before it’s too late!” I love it.
And the kicker, all neighborhood participants (kids and adults) will get a treat from neighboring Lake Champlain Chocolates, with the grand champion carting home something even better from this favorite local sponsor… a chocolate polar bear? Have to wait until Sunday’s judging to see, I guess (March 4 at noon).
And this isn’t the only neighborhood group forming locally to address global climate change. Others in the South Union, Five Sisters, The Addition, and Lakewood Neighborhood Forums have met at least once. Some are using a program called the Low Carbon Diet from the Empowerment Institute.
In fact, my wife just told me that we’re hosting the second meeting of just such a group in our neighborhood this weekend… but, alas, no mention of igloos or chocolate. Gotta work on that.
Anyone in Chittenden County interested in getting something going in his/her neighborhood, it’s simple… post a notice on your neighborhood forum, hold a first meeting/social event, and get rolling. Use the Low Carbon Diet, watch Al Gore’s award-winning movie, or forge your own path.
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
Post Categories
- Uncategorized
- PDF2009
- Calendar
- Northeast Kingdom
- podcast
- Peer Rental
- Localization
- Big Tech
- Events
- PDF2007
- Web Traffic
- Google AdSense
- Pay It Forward
- Elections
- berkmansunlight
- Maps
- Video
- Upstate New York
- Coupons
- Wildlife
- Mobile
- Viral Marketing
- Raffle
- Crisis Response
- Donations
- Lost & Found
- Gratitude
- Real Estate
- College Students
- Social Responsibility
- Orton Family Foundation
- Start ups
- Make It Your Own Awards
- Best of FPF
- Online Civility
- Clay Shirky
- Newspapers
- Humor
- How To Use FPF
- Online Classified Ads
- Peer Reviews
- Politics
- Community Management
- Economic Development
- Local Reviews
- Case Foundation
- Borrow and Lend
- Neighborhood Watch
- Good Government
- Small Business Advertising
- Citizen Journalism
- e-Vermont
- Democracy
- Local Search
- Knight Foundation
- Burlington
- MacArthur Fellows
- Civic Engagement
- Social Media
- social capital
- Social Networking
- Vermont
- Neighborhood
- Community Building
- Local Online
- Front Porch Forum