Category Archives: Social Media
Social Networkers getting Picky
How many online social networks do you belong to? MySpace, LinkedIn, Facebook, Yahoo Geocities, on and on. I can’t find the quote now, but someone wrote recently about a desktop littered with passwords from various social networking sites. For the heavy user of this stuff, the question becomes… which networks are worth it and which should I drop?
Richard Siklos has an interesting piece in the New York Times (fee) yesterday about this. After outlining some of the recent deals where big media companies are buying surging social networking sites (e.g., Sony bought Grouper.com, a video-sharing site, for $65M) as the established media buys its way into this new world, Siklos writes of the challenge of readers evolving from consumers to members:
Social networking… represents a way to live one’s life online. Know this: if you are part of the social networking wave, you will have all the “friends” you can handle. The invite is the new handshake. Get ready for a lot of opportunities to join all kinds of networks – and, one hopes, some appropriately Webby new way to politely say, “No, thank you.”
Front Porch Forum is part social networking. But it’s different than most. Instead of pulling people together around an issue, hobby, desire, etc., our neighborhood forums pull together… well, neighbors. Simple.
The Local Onliner reported recently about major changes at the Los Angeles Times:
The LA Times Online will roll out two new, ecommerce-oriented verticals in the midst of a ripping internal report that says the paper’s online strategy is nowhere near where it needs to be for the paper to have a future… The article also cites a new internal report finding that the online division only has 18 employees, compared to 200 employees at WashingtonPost.com and 50 at nytimes.com. The understaffing has lead to a poor quality website that, in part, accounts for users only staying 11.9 minutes on the site, compared to twice that long on nytimes.com.
The internal report goes on to cite a debilitating philosophical clash between GM Rob Barrett and Joel Sappell, and online executive editor Joel Sappell. Barrett wanted the site to focus on “hyper-local” reports to deliver SoCal readers information about their communities. Sappell argued for building “communities of affinity” rather than geography. [Sounds like the GM’s approach won out.]
So as social networks multiply and people start to get choosy, many, if not most, I think, would want to keep plugged into their neighborhood forum. They can swim in a near-endless ocean of “communities of interest,” but options for connecting with their neighbors online are scant.
Forums Reach Tipping Point
I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. This is a national bestseller that’s been in circulation since 2000. From the back cover: “The tipping point is that magic moment when an idea, trend or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire,” like an epidemic.
I can draw many parallels to what we’re seeing with the growth of Front Porch Forum’s membership. It’s fascinating to watch as neighborhoods “tip,” one after another. A few dozen have passed the threshold already… now they have enough members and enough message traffic to sustain their neighborhood-wide conversation.
I also just read The Accidental Influentials in the latest Harvard Business Review about the work of Peter Dodds and Duncan J. Watts. They offer a different view of the mechanics of a social epidemic:
… Gladwell argues that “social epidemics” are driven in large part by the actions of a tiny minority of special individuals, often called influentials, who are unusually informed, persuasive, or well connected. The idea is intuitively compelling—we think we see it happening all the time—but it doesn’t explain how ideas actually spread.
The supposed importance of influentials derives from a plausible-sounding but largely untested theory called the “two-step flow of communication”: Information flows from the media to the influentials and from them to everyone else…
In recent work, however, [we] have found that influentials have far less impact on social epidemics than is generally supposed. In fact, they don’t seem to be required at all.
… marketing dollars might better be directed toward helping large numbers of ordinary people—possibly with Web-based social networking tools—to reach and influence others just like them.
I’m not sure which social theory best explains what we’re witnessing with the spread of Front Porch Forum. It’s not unlike a dry forest… lighting strikes one neighborhood and its forum bursts into a flame of activity. Other neighborhoods (parts of the forest) smolder for weeks or months before igniting a slow burn. Hmm… I’ll have to work on that comparison.
NY Times weighs in on Local Online
Bob Tedeschi has an interesting article in the New York Times Sunday about local online efforts:
Across the United States, citizen bloggers and deep-pocketed entrepreneurs are creating town-specific, and even neighborhood-specific, Web sites where the public can read and contribute items too small or too fleeting for weekly newspapers. Suburban towns across the greater New York area are joining in, giving residents a new way to avoid traffic snags, find a lost dog or just vent about a local hot-button issue.
“It replaces the guy from 200 years ago who rang the bell in town,” said Chris Marengo, a lawyer in Pleasantville, N.Y., who visits www.Pleasantville.AmericanTowns.com every few days to stay abreast of local events. “It’s as provincial as it gets.”
Pleasantville is one of thousands of municipalities on the AmericanTowns service, which is based in Fairfield, Conn. Like other community-oriented sites, AmericanTowns offers users the chance to post information free, to bolster postings by site editors.
Other sites mentioned include: WestportNow.com and Baristanet. There’s some genuine success here, however, different than Front Porch Forum‘s neighborhood-level approach.
Amazing Tools and Content at Harvard
What a delight! I just returned from a couple days in Cambridge, MA… invited to participate at a Harvard workshop about innovative local uses of the internet, focusing on politics. The event was hosted by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the Sunlight Foundation. About 50 people were invited from around the country.
About half of the speakers were content providers, mostly local and state-level political bloggers. The other half were online tool developers focused on improving public access to information about state and federal legislatures. I strongly recommend checking out what I was lucky enough to see. Some of the participants have kindly blogged and wiki-ed about it already…
David Weinberger, Ethan Zuckerman, David Gillmor, Campaigns Wikia… and others, I’m sure. Try Technorati (photos too).
On the one hand we had bloggers generating great content about fairly narrow topics. On the other were people developing incredible tools for drilling into all sort of data and stories about what’s really going on behind the scenes in Congress and the statehouses. Most of the folks in both these camps shared one challenge… engaging a wide-enough audience.
So Front Porch Forum was met with curiosity and interest. We’re building surprisingly high participation numbers when viewed from a geographical per capita perspective. Lots of great questions and leads. I need to explore more of what was on display. More later, perhaps.
Thanks to Berkman and Sunlight for bringing me to this wonderful event, and to all my colleagues for sharing their projects and insights. A hopeful way to spend the Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday. By the way, snow in Vermont kept me in Cambridge/Somerville an extra night… a local cousin came to my rescue!
Local Reviews from Strangers vs. Neighbors
Millions of dollars are flowing into dot.com start-ups that provide the public a place to read and write reviews on just about anything local… restaurants, stores, etc. Some include: insiderpages.com, judysbook.com, riffs.com, yelp.com, and zipingo.com. Blogosphere comments swirl around their relative merits and their mangement ups and downs… hard to hear the true tune through the din.
Some of the comments seen recently: Rahul Pathak, Naffziger’s Net, Greg Sterling, Andy Sack, TechCrunch and another. It goes on and on, of course. Where’s there’s money invested, there’s commentary.
Front Porch Forum does local review too, but it’s a different model… the reviews are requested and then the reviews come from nearby neighbors. So (1) the reviews are demand driven, and (2) there’s credibility because the advice is coming from the person around the corner with his/her real identity provided. And this is only one of many uses that our neighborhood forums are supporting… classifieds, community organizing, news, etc. It all adds up to helping neighbors connect and foster community within neighborhoods.
In our first city (Burlington, VT), we’re hosting 130 adjacent neighborhood forums that in sum cover the entire metro-area. Five to ten percent of the local households have joined in our first few months with dozens of neighborhoods in the 20-40% range and a couple exceeding 90% already. And it’s all driven by word of mouth and a spinkle of local media attention.
Yahoo buys Social Network Site for $10M
Yahoo continues to add to its lineup of social media offerings, as reported by paidContent.org:
This rumor has been going on for a couple of months, and finally the confirmation, via Forbes.com: Yahoo has bought the distributed social network MyBlogLog…the story says the price is around $10 million. The Orlando, FL-based website that enables readers to leave information about themselves, building a social networks on blogs and on social networking sites.
MyBlogLog was launched June 2006… half a year ago. I’ve got a half-eaten box of cereal older than that.
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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