Turnover Hits Examiner.com Brass
Lots of movement of the executive kind at Examiner.com this summer. Some of what we’ve noticed in just the past weeks: Rick Blair, the company’s CEO, is gone after essentially coming out of retirement to help get the company rolling along a path toward gigantic traffic numbers. You can find him near the beach in North Carolina growing his interest in social investing more than content farms…
Patch-HuffPo Wants Hyperlocal Traffic? Here’s How
Last week I talked to a number of people about Aol’s Patch network and pointed readers to one Patch in particular that ostensibly seemed to be going for (human) form over (hyperlocal) function. It was a little unfair to single them out perhaps, especially with plenty of other examples of click-baiting to highlight, but I’m guessing I wittingly provided them just what they wanted by sort of calling them out: more pageviews, more clicks, more buzz…
Inside National Public Radio’s Play for Local Online
I’ve been writing about large media brands and their hyperlocal efforts for the past few weeks, looking at Gannett, Tribune and PBS for example. Balancing things out with another not-exactly-for-profit property, I recently asked NPR’s digital services GM, Robert Kempf, to talk about his organization’s forays into hyperlocal…
Gannett Casts About in Local, Expands ‘Deal Chicken’
Why did the chicken cross the road? Apparently, deals were on the other side. Gannett is an enormous company with over 50,000 employees managing scores of properties that include hundreds of national and local Web sites, print publications, marketing consultancies, a careers site, not to mention a little thing called USA Today. It’s the typical corporate megalith trying to hold onto customers from the old world as they lurch headlong toward the future, simultaneously ramping up some divisions while laying off hundreds elsewhere…
TribLocal Quietly Blooms to 88 Hyperlocal Sites — And Growing
Tribune Company has long demonstrated its interest in reaching people on a local level — whether it’s through the company’s many local TV and radio stations, newspapers, magazines, their classifieds products or even their digital subsidiaries. The company was far ahead of other media in the early ’90s when they pushed content out over AOL and then the Web. And over the years they’ve also partnered with a number of local online efforts like Digital City. While that experience might be useful to carry over from Local 1.0, the fact is nobody from that period is present today at TribLocal, a relatively new (2007) effort that has online and sites and weekly print companions sprouting up in Chicago neighborhoods like colorful, polished digital plumes…
Location Obsessives Beware: You May Never Leave Your Screens
For years I’ve been fascinated with digitized maps and the spell they can cast. To see where we’re going, where we’ve been, where we could have gone — to become found when lost and undiscoverable when seeking silence – digital maps lead us to all these things, and away from some. The perfect companion. And since the map interface has jumped from atoms to bits, lighting up pixels of core applications on nearly every device stamped out by innovators of sleek glass and steel to copycats of affordable utility (just about all phones now carry mapping apps), almost everyone can play along…
PBS ‘Local’ — Building From the Bottom Up
Sesame Street and Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood might bear resemblance to an idyllic (or frightening) vision of the hyperlocal ideal — but the network behind these standards of our pop-culture recollections has its own ideas about what it means to be out there on the street. PBS wants to bring culture to the neighborhood; to share among others. To be local while not being hyper. To cooperate.
AirRun’s ‘Runners’ Perform Your Tasks
The field of radius-based, phone-centric, hyperlocal services is getting more crowded. I won’t venture to list all the players for fear of leaving some out — “pop,” there’s another one. A few, however, are drawing particular attention in the race to gain enough scale and nomadic-market penetration to deliver on the promise that when a user wants something, someone will be there to deliver it…
Five Elements of a Successful Hyperlocal Site
There are numerous places where local content producers can get advice about how to find the right groove with readers. Some have created guides to those businesses who have executed well, or “7 Habits” lists for successful hyperlocal sites. The folks at J-Lab did their own in-depth investigation into “what works” in hyperlocal journalism and came up with this, while a journalist across the pond takes a diplomatic view when considering hyperlocal content/news sites…
A ‘Vicinity Browser’ That Targets Local with the Power of Social
Once a novelty, “geobrowsing” apps have lately become a bit of a yawn. The products may be useful for navigating the hyperlocal landscape, but they haven’t proven compelling enough to hold consumer interest.
One new-ish product that that might bring geobrowsing back is Cynapse’s Localscope. The iPhone app, which was released in January, does what you might expect from a geo-centered service, gathering information about the area around you from multiple search engines and presenting it on a map. But rather than just focusing on technology or data depth, Localscope takes a lateral step into polishing design and UI to make an elegantly efficient experience…
Webster Says Patch Must ‘Be the Community,’ Others Weigh In
This is a the third installment in a series about hyperlocal past and present. Read here about Digital City / AOL, CitySearch, and Microsoft’s Sidewalk…
I reached out to Warren Webster, President of AOL’s Patch network, the day before their big multi-thousand-blogger launch for thoughts on some of the views of the “Local 1.0” set discussed in the previous posts in this series. In an email he said: “It’s important to note that Patch isn’t citizen journalism. Patch is a platform staffed by professional journalists with an average of nine years experience. Patch also offers many opportunities for members of the community to have a voice on this platform — and for SMBs to drive consumer actions.”..
Hyperlocal 1.0: Matt Kursh Remembers Microsoft’s Sidewalk
A serious contender and moneyed innovator, Microsoft Sidewalk took to the local Web the way the behemoth did most things: with lots of muscle. It quickly squared off with CitySearch over advertising share and rapidly expanded its editorial footprint across the nation – carrying itself with arguably the most style among the hyperlocal contenders.
Ex-CitySearch Chief Conn on Hyperlocal 1.0
This is a the second installment in a series about hyperlocal past and present… An early entrant to the hyperlocal game was the fast-moving (and still going) CitySearch. They focused on data-driven content about entertainment and “things to do,” further crafted by editors in cities around the country. CitySearch went head-to-head with Digital City but saw real competition in Microsoft’s Sidewalk, which they eventually bought. Former CitySearch chief Charles Conn looks back and tells us a little bit about the way it was…
Hyperlocal 1.0 Heavy Bob Smith: ‘The Way It Was’
It’s difficult to pinpoint when online hyperlocal came into being. The idea was there with BBSs (electronic bulletin board services) since the early 1980s or even earlier, when local dial-up services allowed callers to access files, games, chat and so on. Long distance charges caused many to dial in to local boards. And thus local communities developed, with some system operators focusing on delivering local information and news. A few local newspapers tried getting into the game with bulletin boards of their own, or via Usenet Newsgroups…
Read the first in a series of interviews with leaders of what we’re calling Hyperlocal 1.0, as well as a bit of a response from a Hyperlocal 2.0 chief.
Daily Deals by the Numbers
If you’re confused about the whos and whats of the daily deals filling your inbox, clarity has arrived in the form of a quick primer from the folks at Online MBA. They’ve put together a lovely, old-timey visualization illustrating what four of the big guys dealing the deals are actually offering.
Gowalla Eyes Entertainment to Drive Check-Ins
Earlier this month, Gowalla tried something new: it signed deals with indie band The Freelance Whales and small but superior film “Win Win” in a bid to take the check-in service is taking into local music and film promotion – and drive check-ins up 500%.
Street Fight got the low-down on this new direction from Gowalla’s Jonathan Carroll, the music and community manager who handles the service’s events, the Gowalla blog, interaction with the street teams and helping build a worldwide user base. (Read our interview with Gowalla CEO Josh Williams here.)…
Zaarly: Toll Taker on a ‘Buyer-Powered Commerce’ Highway?
Rick Robinson’s Turf Talk column appears every Wednesday. ..
Zaarly – it’s not a new verb expressing something extra cool. Not yet, anyway. But it’s got a pretty good start if you’re judging by its remarkable first two months alone. In that time they’ve pitched and launched the product, wowed celebrity judges at a startup competition in LA and accepted a million bucks in seed funding from, among others, Ashton Kutcher and venture fund Lightbank created by Groupon’s founders. And that’s all before the semi-official launch at SXSW or making a single dime.
Street Fight recently caught up with with the 32-year-old CEO behind this i-need-it-you-got-it service, Bo Fishback…
Arlington Hyperlocal Picks Its Own Patch, Turns a Profit
Scott Brodbeck, the editor of hyperlocal ARLnow.com (Arlington, Va.), which is part of the “authentically local” movement, claims he has a steady thrum of profitable traffic, and an empathy-bordering-on-sympathy for his competition (read: Patch). I thought it would be worthwhile to dig into this apparent and positive anomaly…