Ghost of Midnight

… about neighbors, community and Front Porch Forum

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!

Homethinking compares neighborhoods across cities

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

More from Peter Krasilovsky today…

Homethinking, which rolls out a service today that lets users compare neighborhoods in cities. An art gallery lover in Soho, for instance, might find the 7th street corridor in Washington D.C. to be their place. Gramercy Park is considered a match for Nob Hill in San Francisco.

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

Pay-per-post comes to Angie’s List?

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

Peter Krasilovsky reports today…

Getting people to submit reviews is hard. We’ve seen incentives such as $5 coffee cards (a lot), $10 gas cards, and direct donations to charity (InsiderPages‘ current model)…

This month, Angie’s List, a paid service founded in 1995 that counts 650,000 members… launches a review campaign with the biggest review incentive we’ve seen yet: a free Flip video camera for 15 submissions. The camera is worth about $120. Reviewers also get entered into a $5,000 sweepstakes.

The twist is that all 15 reviews must be for local services, and three of the submissions must be for Angie’s new medical category. The reports on Angie’s List aren’t likely to be rushed affairs, since each one follows a template with six questions — and your name is on it.

Whether you call them the “Three Ms” – members, messages and moolah – or the “Three Cs” – community, content and cash – one of the three critical elements to any Web 2.0 site is “user generated content.”  Those with the magic attract content, while others pay for it.  Some people get bent out of shape about this kind of thing… see it as a sin against all things webby and wonderful.  Not me.

Angie’s List is an established successful big business.  They charge people to participate and now they pay  people in certain cases to write their reviews.  This seems similar to the business of publishing as we’ve always known it… a publisher pays a writer to write and then sells the writing to readers for a fee.

Front Porch Forum does not charge its members to participate… to read or to write… although we have given away a few donated ball game tickets and gift certificates in raffles among members who posted recently.  Who knows what the future will bring?

I think we’ll see more and more experiments among Web 2.0 sites to capture a greater share of the three Cs.  Or is it the “Three Rs?”  Readers, ‘riters, and revenue.  Gotta have lots of all three!

UPDATE:  Andrew Shotland chimed in too.

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.

Riding the adoption bell curve

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

A posting on TechCrunch came with this nifty illustration about adoption of new online services the other day…

… customers and word-of-mouth referrals travel from left to right along a bell curve that starts with Innovators and Early Adopters, peaks with the Early Majority and the Late Majority, and finally permeates with reaction from Laggards.

If I read this right, the author is claiming that Digg and Twitter have about 16% market penetration.  In a previous posting here, it was noted that Digg has 30 million monthly visitors, with 3 million of them registered users.  Considering just the U.S. population (300 million), wouldn’t that put Digg between 1% and 10% penetration?  That is, still far from moving out of the Early Adopter range?

Nearly 20% of our pilot area subscribes to Front Porch Forum, including 33% of Burlington and better than 90% of our leading neighborhoods.  That puts the bulk of our service in the Early Majority area, with our best neighborhoods pushing through the Late Majority and into the Laggards.

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.

Richmond Bridge Open to Cars!

Posted on Friday, October 10, 2008 by • No comments yet

This just in from Richmond Selectboard Member, Erik Filkorn…

The Richmond bridge is open to vehicles up to 3 tons. Plan your trip home accordingly and remember to stop at the final Farmer’s Market tonight!

That’s great news for the people and businesses of Richmond and surrounding towns.  This has been the number one issue in Richmond in the month since the bridge over the Winooski River was suddenly closed.  The village has a wonderful collection of small businesses, many of which have been struggling with the bridge closure.  In fact, “shop Richmond” if you have the chance.

We’re so pleased that Front Porch Forum has been available to help residents, businesses and local public officials communicate and pitch in during this crisis.  In fact, Erik used Front Porch Forum to break the news of the closure on September 4, 2008, shortly after he learned of it, and we’re publishing the good news of its opening right now across Richmond via FPF, just moments after the news became “official.”  Thanks to Erik for making such good use of this service.  Hopefully, the traditional media will cover the bridge-opening soon too.

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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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