Category Archives: Social Networking

Making good neighborhoods better

Posted on Friday, October 24, 2008 by • No comments yet

Sometimes I wonder if Front Porch Forum’s service is a good fit for a neighborhood that is already tight-knit… if everyone already seems to know one another, why would they need FPF?  So the comment from Becky today regarding her neighborhood in South Burlington, VT, was especially appreciated…

I know I speak for many in our neighborhood when I say that your service has brought us closer as a community. We do have a special place here… and we can now communicate through your great site.

Knight News Challenge 2009!

Posted on Friday, October 17, 2008 by • No comments yet

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.

Knight News Challenge

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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Wayward yarn, missing ring and good neighbors

Posted on Wednesday, October 15, 2008 by • No comments yet

Not a day goes by when we don’t hear a story of some little neighbor-to-neighbor success facilitated through Front Porch Forum.  Here are two from this week.  First, Joel wrote to his nearby neighbors, titled “Unlikely Yarn”…

Folks – about a week ago, a wind must have blown someone’s knitting project into my driveway – some half-finished scarves and a great deal of yarn, some of it dangling from the rooftops. Anyway – I’ve gathered it up into a somewhat tidy pile. Someone must be missing this (or now resentful that I’ve found something he/she tossed to the wind in frustration). -Joel

And today we heard back from him…

My post on a knitting project that ended up in my driveway got a happy ending: a neighbor’s car was broken into and the stuff tossed. She read my note and has it back, tangled but safe.

And in a different neighborhood, Ann posted…

I found a man’s wedding ring at Calahan Park on Wednesday Oct.7 at around 2:00. Please call Ann and describe the ring.

A day later it was reunited with Jess who figured it was lost and gone forever!

Now I see that Joel is at it again with…

Folks – I came across a bundle of keys hanging from a tree near northeast corner of South Union and Beech.  Any ideas?

I hope another match is made!

Center’d integrates people, places and plans

Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 by • No comments yet

Mike Boland posted today about a conversation with Center’d’s CEO who…

positions the company as a deeper dive into events, which breaths more functionality into all of the nuances of planning local outings. With the tag line, people, places, plans, it also brings in some social features and local search functionality.

The value proposition lies in the integration of these otherwise disparate local media categories. The idea is that a group of friends can plan a weekday dinner outing, find the location, read reviews (Yelp integration), invite people, and set up a landing page as a central source for event management. One can argue that this already exists with Google Maps, Yelp, and Evite, but the main point is that it doesn’t exist all in one place.

Center’d formerly was known as FatDoor.

Alleged vandal faces prosecution in wake of community response

Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 by • No comments yet

Burlington Police Officer Mike Hemond posted an update on Front Porch Forum today about a well-publicized vandalism case (this blog, Seven Days and Burlington Free Press).

Hello everyone, it’s been a pretty steady late summer / fall for me, so I’ve not been able to post on the Forum for a bit. I’d just like to take a minute to get two updates out, if you have a few minutes to spare:

I wanted to let everybody know that in regards to the VENSR graffiti case, the first hurdle in the process has now been cleared. He was charged, as everyone knows, and then the case grew to include acts in 3 different towns, in large part due to the community response. The suspect was arraigned a short time ago, and the judge ‘found probable cause’ and released the suspect on a court order. This means that the case was sent by the police to the State’s Attorney, reviewed and submitted to the Court by the State at arraignment, and then reviewed by the Judge and found to have merit, an arraignment held, and now the case is in the ‘pre-trial’ process. SA Donovan has elected to prosecute this case himself, and considering the workload over there, that’s no small thing.

In other news, information in this case was also rolled into another occurrence of vandalism, so a second, smaller, string of graffiti cases was solved as well. That individual was also cited into criminal court, and I anticipate SA Donovan taking a firm line on that case as well.

So in short, somewhere on the order of 60+ charges were filed in two strings of cases, the first one closed with help from the community, and  the second closed with the aid of information gained in the first. It’s a great example of a neighborhood getting involved, stepping up to the plate and hitting a home run!

Thanks again to all those who helped out, and I’ll see you on the sidewalks.
Mike

Challenging Conventional Web 2.0 Wisdom

Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 by • 1 comment

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.

WeAre.Us kin to Front Porch Forum?

Posted on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 by • No comments yet

When I read this piece in TechCrunch the other day, the similarities to Front Porch Forum‘s (FPF’s) model added up.

WeAre.Us wants to help. It is a platform of 16 social networks that connect people with chronic illnesses.

FPF’s pilot is a platform of 130 online neighborhood forums.

In contrast to health platforms… which serve as a contact point for health-related topics of any kind, WeAre.Us connects people affected by severe illnesses only… rather than create an all-encompassing site, WeAre.Us decided to take more of a niche social network approach.

FPF focuses on neighbor connection and not in generating its own content.  We’re neighborhood social networks.

The subsites… run on the same core engine but are independent from each other.

FPF neighborhood forums stand alone but all run on the same engine.

WeAre.Us tries to avoid Ning-like scattering effects by allowing users to create communities only if more more than 1,000 members can be expected… The approach seems to work: While Ning has over 50 Crohn’s-based (mostly inactive) micro social networks, for example, WeAre.Us’ single Crohn’s community boasts over 2,000 members… expecting to pass the 10,000 member mark this month (for all of WeAre.Us).

I recall a site somewhat similar to FPF that boasted 5,000 neighborhood groups across North America… and only 10,000 members… sounds like the Ning example.  FPF currently has 11,000 subscribers in its pilot area of 60,000 households, including one-third of Burlington, VT.

CMO Robert Patterson says another differentiator is the active, individualized support the company provides all WeAre.Us members.

FPF offers hands-on community management and customer service.

Limiting Ad Inventory and Banning Ad Networks

Posted on Monday, October 13, 2008 by • No comments yet

Thanks to Daniel for the link to this New York Times piece about newspapers’ online ad sales.  Some points…

After 17 quarters of ballooning growth, online revenue at newspaper sites is falling. In the second quarter, it was down 2.4 percent compared with last year, to $777 million…

Overall online advertising, however, is strong. Display advertising, the graphics-rich ads that newspaper sites carry, grew 7.6 percent in the second quarter…

Unique readers in August were 17 percent higher than a year earlier, at 69.3 million…

Large papers… can sell premium ad space… for $15 to $50 for every thousand impressions. But these and other papers of all sizes have increasingly relied on middlemen — known as ad networks — to sell less desirable space, typically for around $1 for every thousand impressions…

There are now more than 300 networks, most offering custom ads, and they are popular venture-capital investments and acquisition targets…

Some sites unaffiliated with newspapers have also limited inventory and banned ad networks, and many report good results…

Front Porch Forum works with a limited ad inventory and we do not use ad networks.

Web 2.0 for the rest of us?

Posted on Thursday, October 9, 2008 by • 3 comments

Caroline McCarthy 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.

One night, two national awards for Front Porch Forum

Posted on Tuesday, October 7, 2008 by • No comments yet

What a humbling couple of days.  I’ve just returned home from Rural TeleCon 2008.  Yesterday I led a rich discussion about local community building via Front Porch Forum with a room full of telecom professionals, and this evening Front Porch Forum collected two wonderful honors…

First, the RTC People’s Choice Award — Most Innovative, which included a $500 check.  And then, the real shocker, the RTC Champion Award ($3,000)… this is the top national award from the Rural Telecom Congress!  And a genuine honor, especially considering the caliber of the other award finalists.

Credit for FPF’s recognition is shared with many collaborators and advisers, as well as our 11,000 Chittenden County subscribers, 200 participating local public officials, 350 FPF Neighborhood Volunteers, 100 local advertisers, and many donors.  And thanks to the RTC board of directors and conference staff!

See FPF’s growing list of awards and recognition, media coverage, and member testimonials.

UPDATE: Thanks to Cathy Resmer at Seven Days for her coverage on Blurt and Vermont 3.0.

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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