Category Archives: Start ups
“Local social networking communities will thrive”
From Scott Heiferman…
Forbes: “The Watch List: Meetup.com. The bartering economy will expand. Local social networking communities will continue to thrive and help people connect to information, resources, ideas and employees. Meetup.com groups will be at the center of the burgeoning part of the economy. Entrepreneurs will tap these groups for goods and services and to form new partnerships.” (Maureen Farrell via Greg)
We certainly see high volumes of business being done through Front Porch Forum… and it seems to be increasing as the national economy sours.
Center’d integrates people, places and plans
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.
Web 2.0 for the rest of us?
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.
New Media Guru in Vermont Oct. 4
New media thinker and do-er Dan Gillmor will speak at the UVM Center for Rural Studies 30th anniversary bash on October 4, 2008 starting at 5:00 PM. I’ve been fortunate to hear Dan speak and follow his online writing for the past couple years… great stuff. And now he’s leading the newly formed Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication.
Front Porch Forum is tickled pink to be involved (albeit in a small way). Come to the conference all day… or at least catch Dan’s talk at 5:00 PM and the panel he’ll moderate after that.
-Author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism By the People, For the People (2004; O’Reilly Media)
-Director of the Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University’s Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication
-Director of the Center for Citizen MediaAt the newly created Knight Center for Digital Media Entrepreneurship, Dan Gillmor is working to help create a culture of innovation and risk-taking in journalism education, and in the wider media world. He is founder and current director of the Center for Citizen Media and previously founded Grassroots Media, Inc. From 1994-2004, Gillmor was a columnist at the San Jose Mercury News, Silicon Valley’s daily newspaper, and wrote a weblog for SiliconValley.com. He joined the Mercury News after six years with the Detroit Free Press. Before that, he was with the Kansas City Times and several newspapers in Vermont. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate of the University of Vermont (’81), Gillmor received a Herbert Davenport fellowship in 1982 for economics and business reporting at the University of Missouri School of Journalism. During the 1986-87 academic year he was a journalism fellow at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he studied history, political theory and economics. He has won or shared in several regional and national journalism awards. Before becoming a journalist he played music professionally for seven years.
And I seem to recall some former Vermont professional connection of his. Hmm…
Blast from the past… or, Google never forgets
A friend just showed me Google’s newspaper and book archives online… wow. He searched my name and found some oldies I had nearly forgotten from 15-20 years ago…
- An opinion piece I co-wrote for the New York Times based on my policy research.
- The Chicago Sun-Times about my engineering work… “Michael Lewis could do for recycling what Henry Ford did for the automobile industry.” [Disclaimer… didn’t quite work out that way.]
- A book I co-authored published by the U.S. EPA about innovative small businesses.
Y’know… I recall physically clipping those articles and mailing them to people in an envelope with a stamp.
Programmer-Journalists and Local Social Capital
Rich Gordon writes today about his journalist-programmer program at Northwestern’s journalism school. He’s looking for a project idea…
For more than half a century, newspaper readership has been declining – and so have a variety of other indicators of civic and community engagement, such as participation in PTA’s, membership in bowling leagues and turnout on Election Day…
What I’ve been wondering about is whether new technologies can, in any way, help rebuild social capital among people who live in the same community. We know that online communities enable people with common interests to build powerful connections even if they are halfway around the world from one another. I’m intrigued by the possibility that we could apply these online community tools to strengthening local bonds.
It’s also hard to ignore that when conversations about the news occur on the Web, they often turn ugly — or, at best, fail to advance the discussion beyond ranting and raving…
Evidence that local media can play a role in fostering community conversation can be found in newspaper history. David Paul Nord’s fascinating book, “Communities of Journalism,” for instance, describes many instances in which newspapers served as community forums…
Cass Sunstein in his book Republic.com – [argues] that online communities can foster isolation and division by enabling people to connect only with those whose characteristics and attitudes are like theirs.
What I might challenge our students to do is come up with ways to improve online conversations about the news — to build social capital and raise the quality of these conversations.
Of course, this is what Front Porch Forum is all about!
Web success is slow coming
Seth Godin’s recent post rings true to our experience with Front Porch Forum to date…
The irony of the web is that the tactics work really quickly… But the strategy still takes forever. The strategy is the hard part, not the tactics.
… If you stick at stuff that bores them, it accrues. Drip, drip, drip you win.
It still takes ten years to become a success, web or no web.
The media wants overnight successes (so they have someone to tear down). Ignore them. Ignore the early adopter critics that never have enough to play with. Ignore your investors that want proven tactics and predictable instant results. Listen instead to your real customers, to your vision and make something for the long haul. Because that’s how long it’s going to take, guys.
In fact, I’ve often referred to FPF as the “tortoise” compared to lots of “hares” covered in the dot.com press.
Hometown Daily Covers Front Porch Forum
Thanks to Sally Pollak who wrote an excellent feature article about Front Porch Forum for the Burlington Free Press yesterday.
Photo credit: Alison Redlich, Free Press
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
- Big Tech
- Peer Rental
- Events
- Localization
- PDF2007
- Web Traffic
- Google AdSense
- Pay It Forward
- Elections
- berkmansunlight
- Maps
- Video
- Upstate New York
- Coupons
- Wildlife
- Mobile
- Viral Marketing
- Raffle
- Donations
- Crisis Response
- Best of FPF
- Lost & Found
- Gratitude
- Real Estate
- College Students
- Social Responsibility
- Orton Family Foundation
- Start ups
- Make It Your Own Awards
- Online Civility
- Clay Shirky
- Newspapers
- How To Use FPF
- Humor
- 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