Ghost of Midnight

The Economist (7/28/2007) writes about Flavorpill and it’s European equivalent, le cool. Flavorpill publishes “free, weekly e-mails that narrow the torrent [of hundreds of cultural events] down to the two dozen [of the] very best.

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Interesting discussion led by Jeff Jarvis about local news online this week… does hyper local matter to 18-35 year olds or not? And, if not, then let’s just declare it dead and move on. Jeff goes the other way and says that hyperlocal is just very hard to pull off and that everyone [...]

According to David Weinberger today…
According to the Center for Media Research:
A recent survey on current attitudes towards customer ratings and reviews by Bazaarvoice and Vizu Corporation, shows that about three out of four shoppers say that it is extremely or very important to read customer reviews before making a purchase, and they prefer [...]

Jeff Howe has an upbeat piece in Wired magazine (7/24/2007) about Gannett’s big changes to bring their newspapers into the internet age.
By March 2006, the pieces were in place. The Web was to become the primary vehicle for news, with frequent, round-the-clock updates. The newsroom would be rechristened the Information Center, while traditional departments like [...]

Mark Glaser at PBS.org’s MediaShift wrote about FPF previously and yesterday…
When I put the question to MediaShift readers about where they get neighborhood news, I was inundated by fans of the Front Porch Forum service in Burlington, Vermont…
Normally I tend to discount these types of write-in campaigns, but I have to admit that I [...]

Sounds like this effort is getting traction…
With the probably exception of Yelp, standalone review sites haven’t figured out a way to make money. In the past year, InsiderPages was sold off to CitySearch, and Judy’s Book, famously, changed its model to coupons.
So why would Josh Walker, Forrester’s former head of consumer research, dive into the [...]

Kevin Harris writes today…
Adults were three times more likely to play out when they were young, than children are today… released by Play England:
71 per cent of adults played outside in the street or area close to their homes every day when they were children, compared to only 21 per cent of children today.
There has [...]

Here’s my favorite use of Front Porch Forum out of today’s batch of neighbor-to-neighbor messages…
On Friday July 20, our neighborhood hosted lunch for folks at the COTS Daystation!  People there expressed surprise and appreciation when I brought in cooler after cooler of bag lunches.  One face in particular brightened when I said there was everything [...]

Thanks seem hardly enough when conveyed to UVM Professor Susan Comerford for her remarkable words shared on a PBS.org blog this week…
Front Porch Forum is a postmodern return to citizen democracy which is nurturing the burgeoning hunger for community in our society. Feeding the mind and the soul, the neighborly interchange provides the information necessary [...]

Yelvington writes today about the wax and wane of social networking site popularity…
Brands just aren’t what they used to be. A brand used to be something that stood the test of time. Now a brand is still powerful in terms of defining what a product is all about, but when it comes to loyalty, fuggetaboutit. [...]