Street Fight Daily: 02.27.12

A roundup of today’s big stories in hyperlocal media, technology, advertising and startups.

3 Things Retailers Can Learn from Mom and Pop Facebook Stores (Mashable)
Christian Taylor: Recently, Gap and J.C. Penney closed their Facebook storefronts because the retailers weren’t seeing immediate traction. The move has sparked an interesting debate: whether Facebook commerce will actually take off. Clearly, we are still in the very early days of Facebook shopping, but there is already ample evidence that social commerce is thriving.

Print is Dead! Long Live Print? (TechCrunch)
Jordan Kurzweil: Readership is declining, local news website traffic is infinitesimal, and even pure digital plays like Patch can’t seem to find readers or revenue. The fact is, the thirst for local news can be sated by a single hometown blog, run pretty much by a single entrepreneurial blogger (granted they’d be very busy – and underpaid).

Patch: We’re nothing like Main Street Connect (Jim Romenesko)
“I regret to stoop to the point of responding to you,” Patch president Warren Webster told a rival this week, “but I will here.” This little spat took place in the Business Insider comments section. Main Street Connect founder Carll Tucker wrote that his online national community news outfit “has a similar model but is turning a profit.” He added: “Perhaps Aol should have invested in profitable models like ours rather than dumping money into Patch.”

Can OpenGeocoder Fill the Platform Gap Left by Google Maps? (ReadWriteWeb)
Google Maps says you can only use its geocoder to display data on maps but sometimes developers want to use geo data for other purposes, like content filtering. Yahoo has great geocoding technology but no one trusts it will be around for long. Open Street Map is under a particular Creative Commons license and “exists for the ideological minority,” says Steve Coast, the man who lead its creation.

Tell Location-Based, Multimedia-Rich Stories With Moveable Feast (Mashable)
The creation tool in the app allows you to drop pins on the Google Maps interface. At each location, you can add text, audio, photographs and video from your personal files. After you hit publish, other app users will be able to download your tour, either experiencing it on-site or remotely.

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