Also from The Local Onliner today, an interesting quote from an outgoing R.H. Donnelly executive, Simon Greenman:
Yellow Pages “[p]ublishers are well-positioned to become local search providers. But they’ll need to become much broader, with classifieds, promotional information and service directories. They’ll need to become more consumer-centric, with social networking, merchant recommendations and other features.”
I’m not sure how compelling all these features are when tacked onto a local search site. Front Porch Forum‘s approach is to build the most engaging local social networking service available, then integrate commercial features to add value for our members and pay the bills. That is, design the service for neighbors, and only treat these good people as consumers when and where it makes sense.
What are the most common categories for what people are looking for in (1) the Yellow Page and (2) local online search? Same things? Apparently not, according to The Local Onliner:
Just this week, Ask released the Top 10 food, music and business search lookups for its revised AskCity service. Here’s how AskCity’s Business Search compares to The Yellow Pages Association’s Top 300 categories:
1. Massage (#148)
2. Shopping mall (NA)
3. Hospitals (#9)
4. Family doctor (#2)
5. Churches (#22)
6. Plumber (#10)
7. Florist (#16)
8. Police department (NA)
9. General practice attorneys (#6)
10. Auto repair (#4)
The top ten Yellow Pages categories (from source above):
1. Restaurants (Fast Food & Nonspecific) 1,341 (millions of references)
2. Physician & Surgeons 1,173
3. Automobile Parts 567
4. Automobile Repair 449
5. Pizza 358
6. Attorneys 312
7. Automobile Dealers 28
8. Dentists 251
9. Hospitals 245
10. Plumber 244
Front Porch Forum doesn’t have enough data yet to be meaningful, but it will be interesting to see over time what our members are looking up in our message archives and via our sponsored links (forthcoming).
A story about Front Porch Forum will air tomorrow (Dec. 20, 2006) on Vermont Public Radio’s Morning Edition at 7:49 AM. That’s 107.9 FM around Burlington. We’ll have the audio version on our Media page after the fact. Thanks to Mitch Wertlieb and Ben Embry of VPR.
Side-by-side neighborhood photographs taken this year and in the 1930s provide great insight… each pair worth 2,000 words, I guess. Check out Depression Era Streetscapes, a project of University of Vermont Professor Thomas Visser. The site covers much of Burlington, Vermont, USA.
Mia Moran of Channel 5 News WPTZ captured the essence of what we’re after with Front Porch Forum in a piece broadcast last night. And bonus points to her and cameraman Nick for braving our home during the toddler bewitching hour. If you have trouble watching this video (on WPTZ’s site), hold tight… I hope to have a more accessible version directly on our server soon.
And in another take on related matters, Peter Krasilovsky reports on two more city sites: Pegasus News in Dallas and CitySquares in Boston. CitySquares co-founder Ben Saren reports 300 advertisers paying a flat 25 cents/click.
To date, neighborhoods out of the downtown district do best, like Jamaica Plain and Harvard Square. “There is a lot more of a neighborhood mentality,” says Saren The more homogenized, high rent businesses in downtown Boston are less likely to pitch their tent with a local city site.
Saren, like Pegasus’ Orren, hopes to take his concept beyond his city’s borders. “Ideally, it would be a Tier 2 or Tier 3 market with a college orientation, like a Burlington or Tallahassee,” he says.
Hmm… I wonder how this would work in home-sweet-home Burlington.
Nearly a quarter of private-sector, non-farm jobs in Vermont are in micro-enterprises, according to the Association for Enterprise Opportunity and reported by Leslie Wright in the Burlington Free Press today. The number of such businesses grew about 8% from 2001 to 2003.
A micro-enterprise employs fewer than five people and requires $35,000 or less in start-up capital.
I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with several small-scale local entrepreneurs whose business fits that definition. Many are excited about working with Front Porch Forum to connect with people in the neighborhoods that they serve. They often complain about being priced out of conventional means, such as the Yellow Pages. Plus, many of these folks are doing business with their neighbors, so they’re interested in supporting FPF as a community-building resource.
Some places have a great sense of community, but most neighborhoods in America, me thinks, do not. A new book, Applebee’s America, seems to agree:
“Life is changing too damn fast,” Cindy Moran told us one day at an Applebee’s restaurant in Howell, Michigan. A single mother of two, Moran was one of the dozens of people we interviewed for this book to gauge the mood of the country. “It’s not easy being the kind of mother I want to be,” she said, carving a high-calorie path through a bowl of spinach dip while her daughter begged for more, “not with life stuck on fast-forward.”
Buffeted by change, people like Moran crave the comfort of community. They want to know their neighbors and meet people like themselves no matter where they live. They want to help improve their neighborhoods and their country. They want to belong.
Our Front Porch Forum experience concurs. The babysitter find, car sale, plumber referral, etc. through our neighborhood forums are almost bonus to the main event… connecting with neighbors. The Dallas Morning News recently ran a piece by the book’s authors:
In the next quarter-century, the nation is expected to increase its housing, office and business stock by 50 percent, and the great majority of that new building will take place in exurbs. But the rapid sprawl comes with complications that few people notice until they’re ensconced – including hellish commutes, overcrowded schools, disappearing open space, inadequate public works and social disconnectedness.
“My next-door neighbor is not friendly, and the rest of them I don’t even know,” Ms. Kromer [a housewife from Livingston County, Mich.] says. “They drive past my house, open their garages from inside their car, and disappear until their car comes popping back out in the morning.”
We’ve heard versions of this last quote so many times that we’ve lost count. Time to do something about it!
From an interview in .net magazine with Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake:
Community building is also what got Yahoo! so interested in Ludicorp’s creation and although Yahoo! has got some of the best technical resources behind it, Caterina believes that skills and money don’t guarantee users. “The interesting thing about acquisitions of this kind is that you can’t just suddenly build a community. You can’t just go out and replicate all of the features and functionality of something you’ve seen, it doesn’t really work that way.”
According to Caterina: “The most difficult part is not the technology but actually getting the people to behave well.” When first starting the community the Flickr team were spending nearly 24 hours online greeting each individual user, introducing them to each other and cultivating the community. “After a certain point you can let go and the community will start to maintain itself, explains Caterina. “People will greet each other and introduce their own practices into the social software. It’s always underestimated, but early on you need someone in there everyday who is kind of like the host of the party, who introduces everybody and takes their coat.”
Thanks to Jason Kottke for the reference, as well as an additional example.
With the development of Front Porch Forum, I too have been spending time online with our early members helping to shape that sense of community… online community that is. So that the positive, constructive, civil tone we’ve achieved will carry over from the online community into the actual neighborhood. Some have suggested that this aspect isn’t scalable… I’m confident it will be. Already we have about 6% of our members self-selected as neighborhood forum volunteers to help make this happen. People are able and willing to step up when it’s their neighborhood.
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