Search Results for: "scale"
What’s “local?” Define “neighborhood.”
U.K.’s Kevin Harris blogs…
Over on the Local democracy blog Dave Briggs asks, how close is local?
I’d say most people regard ‘local’ as geographically within reach, and obviously that differs individually, which is fine. If terminology is fuzzy it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s invalid. We need definitions for administrative areas (wards, cantons, parishes) but not to explain individually-variable experiences of the socially-charged space nearest to the home.
And maybe it helps to think about what local is not. For instance, it’s not the same as nearness, and that’s reinforced in this image (courtesy of Indy Johar, 00 architects), which reminds us how transport efficiencies influence our sense of distance.
So why after generations and centuries of people gathering together in villages, towns and cities, are we suddenly struggling with the fact that terms like neighbourhood and locality aren’t rigidly defined? What has happened for instance that causes Dave quite reasonably to suggest that
‘it will be increasingly important to research how people’s notions of their own ‘local’ will determine levels of interest’? …
Harkens back to a post about neighborhood scale based on early Front Porch Forum experience.
Vermonters to Inauguration
President Obama’s inauguration was incredible… inspirational. Here are a couple of TV news stories from WPTZ (on the way to DC and upon our return)…
[grr… can’t get the video to load here or onto YouTube… hopefully WPTZ will keep them accessible on its site for awhile.]
And some newspaper coverage of our journey is here.
It’s always a kick when our baby, Front Porch Forum, helps deliver something particularly amazing to our lives… like this whole DC experience.
UPDATE: Here are links to an article by Lynn Monty and a video (below too) by Mark Gould, both of the Burlington Free Press, who were “embedded” on our bus trip.
Lessons for Social Software
I’ve admired Clay Shirky‘s work since first meeting him a couple years ago at a Personal Democracy Forum. Somehow though, I had missed his excellent 2003 piece “A Group is Its Own Worst Enemy.” So thanks to Rich Gordon for pointing to it this week.
Clay’s speech lays out commonalities across social software, pulling lessons from the past few decades… and pre-Web 2.0 explosion. It reads, to me, like a text book version of the lessons we’ve learned “the hard way” in hosting Front Porch Forum.
My wife, Valerie, and I started FPF in 2000 as a stand-alone online neighborhood forum. We leaned on our neighbors to help us develop the rules of engagement… some firm (e.g., no anonymity), others soft (like a generally civil and constructive tone). In 2006, we launched a network of 130 online neighborhood forums blanketing our pilot area of Chittenden County, VT, and continued to evolve our rules based largely on member feedback.
Some of Clay’s points from 2003 that strike a chord…
So there’s this very complicated moment of a group coming together, where enough individuals, for whatever reason, sort of agree that something worthwhile is happening, and the decision they make at that moment is: This is good and must be protected. And at that moment, even if it’s subconscious, you start getting group effects. And the effects that we’ve seen come up over and over and over again in online communities.
He cites some research too about groups defeating their own purpose by veering off course… three patterns…
Sex talk… the group conceives of its purpose as the hosting of flirtatious or salacious talk or emotions passing between pairs of members
Identification and vilification of external enemies
Religious veneration. The nomination and worship of a religious icon or a set of religious tenets… something that’s beyond critique.
And…
You can find the same piece of code running in many, many environments. And sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. So there is something supernatural about groups being a run-time experience. The normal experience of social software is failure. If you go into Yahoo groups and you map out the subscriptions, it is, unsurprisingly, a power law. There’s a small number of highly populated groups, a moderate number of moderately populated groups, and this long, flat tail of failure. And the failure is inevitably more than 50% of the total mailing lists in any category.
Clay’s tips for developing and running social software…
- You cannot completely separate technical and social issues
- Members (“super users”) are different than users
- The core group has rights that trump individual rights in some situations (serve the group over the individual)
- Design for handles (similar to identity) that the user can invest in
- Design some way in which good works get recognized
- You need barriers to participation. You have to have some cost to either join or participate, if not at the lowest level, then at higher levels. There needs to be some kind of segmentation of capabilities.
- Find a way to spare the group from scale. Scale alone kills conversations, because conversations require dense two-way conversations.
Yelp, Local Online Leader, worth $200M?
TechCrunch reported this week…
Yelp, the popular local review site, will soon announce a new $15 million dollar round of financing led by DAG Ventures. The valuation is rumored to be in the $200 million range. Yelp says that they will be using the money to expand geographically, add onto their sales team, and establish an office in NYC (they are based in San Francisco). This is Yelp’s fourth round of funding since their founding in 2004. Yelp is also boasting some impressive stats: 8.3 million uniques in the past 30 days and over 2.3 million review.
Yelp has become a poster child for how to build a local reviews site and has become a clear favorite of the twenty and thirty-something urban “foodie”.
And Greg Sterling offers…
Yelp’s success is about its “personality” and “transparency.” The site has managed to create a brand as a result of offering content that people have come to value and trust.
This brand identity is what now lifts it above many or most of its competitors.
But it’s the comment area on TechCrunch that starts to get at the most interesting points. E.g.,
Comment No. 12 says in part…
Local interest websites are always non-viral, because they operate in the disjoint “internets” of each metropolitan area. So one needs to wait a very long time before they reach decent size. For Craigslist, it took 7-8 years. VCs will not wait that long. To accelerate this, you can throw money at the distribution/marketing. I do not know what the timescale for them will be in NYC, but VCs may get impatient, especially because this business is very recession-prone, and the recession is coming.
Comment No. 15…
i’m no expert, but $200mm for sub-$10 million revenue, no profits, and difficult to scale growth (building a community in a new metro area takes time and local ad sales takes sales manpower) seems really generous. i guess yelp is essentially the market leader and probably does get high return traffic from those who do use the site… maybe you can argue a decent ltv for each user?
And comment No. 37…
I helped start a review site that was funded at the same time as Yelp, InsiderPages, Judysbook, etc. After building the feature set, we set forth to capture the YP advertising market. Kelsey Group and other industry pundits were playing up the pending “massive” migration of local advertising from offline to online. We all wanted to be there to capture it.
There was one big problem with capturing those ad dollars: the cost of sale. Reaching out to local businesses costs money, a LOT of it. I’m not sure what Yelp’s rate in customer-review-leads-to-advertiser equation looks like, but here’s some back-of-the-envelope math:
2.3 million reviews
Assume average of 1.5 reviews per business location (this is generous)
yields
1.5 million businesses reviewed to dateBreak down those businesses:
60% local, 40% regional or chain (some split along those lines)The ad dollars are in the “national-local” or “regional-local” businesses. They have bigger budgets, and they’re familiar with the web play. But if you’re in the local review business, how many of your users will enjoy ads from Applebees and Home Depot?
So, you go after the “local-local” businesses, because that’s what brings the value of your site (Yelp) over the big guys (Yahoo Local, Google Local). Reaching out to these folks? You have to put feet on the street, and the cost of the sale just doesn’t pencil out.
Because of this, Yelp’s strategy is obvious acquisition. But at those numbers and a fourth round, they need to be eclipsing the {portal-name-here} Local properties in traffic. In short, good luck.
Front Porch Forum is not a local review site (although many of our subscribers do use it for reviews), but many of the points above apply. We launched in our pilot area about 18 months ago and it gets a little easier every day in ways that money can’t buy.
Everyblock out of the gate
Congratulations to the Everyblock team… they just launched this new service in Chicago, New York and San Francisco…
EveryBlock filters an assortment of local news by location so you can keep track of what’s happening on your block, in your neighborhood and all over your city.
Powerful stuff. I might subscribe to an RSS feed of my neighborhood if I lived in a large city… but I doubt I’d visit regularly. Also I wonder if the info flow will be appropriately scaled. That is, if Everyblock delivers a phone book worth of minutia every day for one neighborhood… that’s too much. And too little info flow doesn’t work either.
Looks like they’re on to something powerful. They seem to be making good use of the free $1.1M gift given by the old newspaper money people at Knight.
PTA Email Lists – Trouble?
Thanks to Maggie Gundersen for drawing my attention to today’s Washington Post article about PTA-focused Yahoo Groups in the Washington suburbs… worth a read.
Over the past few years, electronic mailing lists have become the main forum for parents across the region to talk about their schools. With just a few keystrokes, the lists offer parents unprecedented power to spread information, to ask a question or answer one, to praise or pillory for an audience of hundreds.
As school e-mail lists multiply in size and reach, they are increasingly becoming ensnared in contests for control of the medium and the message. Principals are accused of trying to silence their discussion-group critics. Parents have allegedly stolen or hijacked e-mail lists. Moderators who step in to halt vitriolic threads are sometimes accused of censorship.
Some of the most contentious school controversies of recent years have played out largely on e-mail lists: reaction over a plan to distribute hip flasks as a senior gift in 2006 at Arlington County‘s H-B Woodlawn Secondary Program; debate about military recruitment at Walt Whitman High School in Bethesda in 2005; and discontent, this winter, with a $50 graduation fee at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring.
“It’s the new venue. It’s the new community forum,” said Pat Elder, a Whitman parent who protested the presence of military recruiters on the Whitcom mailing list. “We’re too busy to, you know, meet.”
It goes on to detail some of the disagreements.
This begs for comparison to Front Porch Forum. Somewhat similar technology, scale and local focus… but big differences too. Schools, almost by definition, are breeding grounds for controversy and skirmishes among parents, teachers, admin, politicians, media, etc. And email, especially bulk email, is a notoriously poor medium for resolving conflict. It tends to foster and escalate misunderstanding.
Front Porch Forum tends to turn all that around… building community within neighborhoods. Still, there are lessons here.
Yi-Tan, rBlock and FPF
Thanks to Jerry Michalski for inviting me to participate in his Yi-Tan Weekly Call today about community building at the neighborhood level. There, I learned about other efforts, including…
LifeAt, Meet the Neighbors, Neighborology, i-neighbors, Front Porch Forum, TownConnect, Mesh Tennis and rBlock
Vivek Hutheesin, rBlock’s founder, offered many excellent insights. And from his most recent blog posting…
Fatdoor has just announced in Private Equity Hub their first-round financing through Norwest Venture Partners and their new CEO, Jennifer Dulski, from Yahoo! Here is a quote from Jennifer, which I know is true from my own experience:
“Building online local communities that scale is an extremely difficult problem to solve, but the market opportunity is immense and consumers are craving a solution that will make this vision a reality.”
To address this immense market, any platform needs to first solve some very difficult problems in four areas – boundaries, applications, verification, and privacy. rBlock believes that it has solved them all. However to win a big share of this immense market, rBlock’s solutions must be integrated in a manner that leads to viral growth. This requires, among other things, a user-interface that’s easy-to-use and scalable. rBlock believes it has solved this too, paving the way for more plan execution than experimentation.
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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