Will Microlocal Work for Community Bulletin Board Sites?

9 Comments 19 January 2012 by Patrick Kitano

The default local community bulletin board of Web 1.0 was Craigslist. The second generation, including Topix and Outside.In (now a part of AOL), pioneered hyperlocal news aggregation to construct a feed-based local newspaper — but these companies’ main challenge has been to nurture local conversations around news. Topix in particular has been able to develop active forums at a citywide level. The next question is whether microlocal news and forums — down to the block level — will work.

EveryBlock, now a part of msnbc.com, was the first to develop a microlocal news source, aggregating publicly available neighborhood data like police blotter reports, graffiti complaints and Yelp reviews down to a block level. The array of aggregated data include 1) Neighbor contributions 2) Public records and 3) Web based reviews and listings.

Pulling public records and web based feeds is easy, Everyblock’s challenge is in attracting “neighbor” generated content. Even in a hyper-wired San Francisco, a good place to judge first-mover traction, the city message board is fairly sparse. Yesterday, Everyblock announced the addition of their new Events page with the intent to aggregate neighborhood events from the siloes of park and rec departments and newspaper things to do columns into one place.

Nextdoor.com is a new social “bulletin board” startup that attempts to jumpstart membership traction by setting a minimum of ten confirmed residents to establish a neighborhood. Once set up, the community bulletin boards provide typical utility, allowing neighbors to message each other, post events and classifieds, and make recommendations.

Is Facebook the solution?
Everyblock and Nextdoor are separate destinations that users normally don’t visit daily like Facebook. And they won’t visit them daily unless their neighbors are actively contributing new content. And when users do contribute content, like posting a neighborhood event or classified, they will generally gravitate to well trafficked sites like local media publishers (including Patch), or Craigslist for wider distribution. Communities need leaders: are there enough of them in smaller block-level areas to create traction?

Everyblock and Nextdoor may need to go where the local conversational action is, Facebook. For example, microlocals could partner with Facebook and allow their subscribers to create a Facebook group for their neighborhood with all the bells and whistles (classifieds, recommendations, events listings) associated with their web application. It would much easier to create “turnkey” neighborhoods by leveraging existing Facebook networks because it’s the simple Facebook login we’re all used to.

The obvious tradeoffs for this are 1) microlocals will lose direct visitors to their websites, and thus the necessary traffic needed to sell advertising, and 2) they get into bed with an elephant partner in Facebook that can change the rules of the game easily. One possible business model would be to charge merchants for advertising across its own platform as well as through their associated Facebook group.

Patrick Kitano is founding Principal of Brand into Media, a strategy group for social brand management solutions, and administrator of the Breaking News Network, a national hyperlocal network devoted to community service. He is the author of Media Transparent, and contributor to Social Media Today, Daily Deal Media, and The Customer Collective.

« Sounds and Places: Experiencing Bluebrain’s ‘Central Park’

Street Fight Daily: 01.20.11 »

http://twitter.com/frontporchforum Front Porch Forum
Interesting piece, Patrick. Everyblock’s efforts are worthy of close attention.
Indeed, the “neighbor conversation” online space is heating up tremendously, with at least a couple dozen start-ups and digital media giants trying to crack the code of neighborhood-level traction.
Three out of five Burlington, VT households connect with their neighbors through our offering, FrontPorchForum.com. Amazingly, in 2011 HALF of them posted.
Most of us want to be more connected to the people and place around where we live… this is a huge opportunity.
http://www.holovaty.com/ Adrian Holovaty
I’ve got a couple of subtle and not-so-subtle corrections here from somebody in the trenches. I founded EveryBlock and have been working on it for 4.5 years.
“EveryBlock, now a part of MSNBC, was one of the first to develop a microlocal news source…down to a block level” — No need to soften the language here. We were *the* first.
Also, a subtle distinction: we’re a part of msnbc.com, which is a separate company from MSNBC.
“Pulling public records and web based feeds is easy” — I wish it were! In fact, pulling public records is quite difficult. Convincing governments to open their data, writing the code that parses/scrapes it, figuring out what it *means* and explaining that in a way that normal people care about, AND doing this basically from scratch in each city (!): each of these things is a tough task, and each requires separate skill sets. It’s true that it’s getting easier given the trendiness of open government data as of late, but it’s still far from easy.
“Even in a hyper-wired San Francisco, a good place to judge first-mover traction, the city message board is fairly sparse” — Judge us by our Chicago site, not San Francisco. http://chicago.everyblock.com/top/ is the place to look. Each day there are all sorts of block and neighborhood conversations happening all over the city.
“Everyblock and Nextdoor are separate destinations that users normally don’t visit daily like Facebook” — Of course EveryBlock doesn’t compare to Facebook, but EveryBlock is indeed visited daily by our core users. It helps that we have a daily email digest of all activity near the places you follow.
“And they won’t visit them daily unless their neighbors are actively contributing new content” — This is an incorrect assumption in the case of EveryBlock, because of all of our non-user-submitted news. Even if nobody in my neighborhood posts stuff in a given day, I’ll still see probably a dozen little pieces of news, whether it’s Flickr photos, reported crimes, neighborhood media mentions or any of the 20+ types of information we collect (some of which is visible in your screenshot above; it’s different in each metro). This is very deliberate on our part, precisely because of this problem you identified.
Adrian @ EveryBlock

http://twitter.com/pkitano Pat Kitano
Thanks for the clarifications Adrian. What is the difference between traction in Chicago versus the other American cities? Can it be replicated?

http://www.holovaty.com/ Adrian Holovaty
Good things (and answers to your questions) come to those who correct the errors in their original articles.
Adrian

David Hirschman
Hi Adrian,
I’ve amended the article to change the top two items. The others aren’t factual errors, per se, but you’ve responded to them pretty well in the comment above.
Best,
David.

http://twitter.com/tolles Chris Tolles
Hmmm.
Booting up new towns or areas is a very very difficult problem. I live in SF and Adrian’s exhortation to visit Chicago makes me a little sad
We’ve done a lot better in smaller towns without the competition of a place like Craigslist (which actually still does very very well with local forums in a lot of cities) and still it is mind blowingly difficult even there to get a new place going.
Our method was to aggregate and create local news feeds from 50k sources, often in places where we have become the only news source focused on their town, and our experience suggests that this works probabilistically — and it was best to do it in a *lot* of places as the percentage takeoff is way way under 100%
Further, past a certain point, making the news “better” or adding a bunch of other stuff to it (we did this in our first iPhone app “Aura”) didn’t work to boot up new communities. We keep an eye on the Everyblock service as they do about as much as you could *possibly* do with regards to integration of available info, but so far, the cost benefit doesn’t seem to be something we want to steal..er…innovate around.
Instead, we’re trying to get our couple of thousand towns to start looking at a local take on national issues around the 2012 election and its associated issues to get more involvement, and then hope that this spreads activity and boots up more areas.
Glad you guys are keeping watch on this space!
Chris Tolles
CEO Topix
Matt McAlister
Local communities form around people not software.
If the software can help a local champion catalyze conversations in the community or help them make money or help them expand their influence in their area then activity will flourish through that software.
Facebook can do that, though I’d argue local social connections are very different from personal social connections.
Blogging platforms have done a pretty good job of serving the needs of local champions, but they can be too broadcast-oriented and lack the power of a collaborative space.
Wikis are good for participation, but they can be too complex to setup for many people and don’t necessarily serve local needs well.
Perhaps a more collaborative and open microblog approach could work.
We’re developing something like that in the UK which we’ve called n0tice.com. We’ve explicitly used the noticeboard or bulletin board metaphor, but we took it a step further and made it possible to create your own customized noticeboard for your local community.
…you can also make money. You retain 85% of the revenue earned on featured ads on your noticeboard.
Early days, clearly, but the model seems to appeal.
Matt
TR in WS
EveryBlock STARTED in Chicago. That would be the massive, huge, incontrovertible, undeniable difference as to why it is alive and kicking there, and not generating much discussion elsewhere (or so it seems). And here’s hoping that makes it clearer as to why you are not going to get genuine, real, heartfelt traction with all of these aggregation/generic/templatized type services. You MUST be born of the neighborhood to serve the neighborhood and be embraced by the neighborhood – and even then, it’s no slam dunk, trust me and the hundreds who are laboring at this across the country as true independent community-collaborative sites. Why in the world does everyone think there has to be a 7-11 or McDonald’s type chain of microlocal? Go create something that sings for your own hometown, and leave the rest of the world to be Authentically Local in their own way. If you really want to create a tool to help folks, then do so, but don’t do it by setting up Podunk.Mysoftware.Com x 1,000 and saying “Hi! We’re here! We want to be your gathering place!”
P.S. Back to EveryBlock, I think what’s been created there is awesome – but there is no need for it to yearn to be a discussion site too. IMNSHO.
Tracy

http://twitter.com/pkitano Pat Kitano
I agree, hometowns will naturally work in hyperlocal. I think the main question is how to take a national system like Everyblock and replicate that hometown spirit in other cities.