Ghost of Midnight

Dot.com titans are hard at work to tie into the millions of small and medium businesses (SMB or SME) in the United States. I recall a Business 2.0 article that pegged the Yellow Pages as a $15B/year industry… that’s all paper, not online. And Peter Krasilovsky reported today about Google’s efforts to provide [...]

Anyone who organizes public gatherings knows how hard it can be to attract a good showing of local folks (unless major controversy erupts). Some thinkers reason that people just don’t care these days or they’re too busy.
I’m beginning to wonder if it’s more a case of the message being drowned out by the din of [...]

Watching neighbors connect through Front Porch Forum is often both fascinating and moving. This post from today, e.g., adds to other evidence we’ve witnessed of people wanting and waiting for a chance to lend a helping hand to those around them.
My husband died from metastatic prostate cancer in October. I asked for help [...]

Rob Maurizi just forwarded this piece from Time magazine (Europe Edition) by Grant Rosenberg about Peuplade:
Just two months old, Peuplade enables users to find like-minded Parisians in their own neighborhood, or even their own building, to schedule a range of activities, including after-work drinks, jogging groups and block parties. Already some 40,000 people have signed [...]

Anecdotes are piling up of increased neighborliness in areas with vibrant Front Porch Forums. People seem more willing to see those living around them as neighbors worth getting to know vs. strangers who happen to live a few doors away once an FPF neighborhood forum breaks the ice. Some such stories are collected [...]

Peter Krasilovsky reviewed Tom Grubisch’s new article on local online efforts today:
Community networks, or “we networks,” are so poorly used that they tend to really be “me networks.” That’s the gist of a new article in Annenberg’s Online Journalism Review by Tom Grubisch, who revisits the subject a little more than a year after first [...]

An article in The Birmingham News by Hannah Wolfson last month (thanks to Keith Hampton for pointing it out) outlines neighborhood-level online activity around Birmingham, Alabama. The stories she relays are happening with Front Porch Forum neighborhoods too… very similar.
They’re part of a growing movement across the metro area, where residents are turning the [...]

Recently, Peter Krasilovsky noted in The Local Onliner that Backfence.com is finding success with it’s “hyper-local” online newspapers (content supplied by local volunteers). Backfence attracted a $3M investment over the last year and now is operating in 13 communities. Further…
Usage-wise, more than 10 percent of local residents in the site’s communities are logging [...]

Seems like multiple overlapping versions of the internet are evolving… corporate, commercial, entertainment, social, blogosphere, etc. And now, increasingly, local. Unlike most of the other uses of the internet, I think the local version begs for people to not be anonymous, not rant quite so abusively, and not swing too far into vices… [...]

I just set up the links in the margins here.  It’s interesting to see other online efforts attempting to support community within neighborhoods.  Each has it’s own approach.  Of course, I’m biased and favor the strategy used by Front Porch Forum.  I’d love to participate on a panel with representatives of:

Front Porch Forum
i-Neighbors
Local2me
Meet the Neighbors
outside.in
Smalltown
craigslist
meetup.com
Yahoo [...]