Ghost of Midnight

John Kelsey writes today…
In 2005, Jonathan Weber launched New West Publishing, an online independent local media company designed to serve the “culture, economy, politics, environment and life style of the Rocky Mountain West.” Today NewWest.net is structured as a regional publication that also focuses in on seven local markets. He reiterated… the difficulty of [...]

Greg Sterling writes today about Yahoo’s new trial service called Neighbors…
Yahoo! has introduced a very interesting new feature on Local: Neighbors. A new tab will appear, “Neighbors,” that offers a community discussion area and organizing tool…

Andy Sack, former CEO of Judy’s Book, shared some lessons learned this week on his blog…
The first mistake: we weren’t aggressive enough in customer acquisition…
The second mistake: we expanded out of Seattle in August 2005 and went national… Ultimately, this decision prevented us from focusing on the customer acquisition problem I mentioned above as well [...]

David Ardia’s post just alerted me to the fact that iBrattleboro is being sued for libel over something written in the comment section of their site.

Steve Outing offers his “lessons learned” on  the just-dead Enthusiast Group (“experiment in grassroots media and social networking (as applied to niche sports)”).  Here’s one of his lessons that caught my eye…
If citizen-content-exclusive destination sites don’t make sense when it comes to hyperlocal content, what else can you do with user-submitted content? Another approach is [...]

Cameron Ferroni of Marchex wrote today about the special place Craigslist holds for him…
… it really boils down to the fact that the simplicity of the experience and the personal nature of the interactions make this stand head and shoulder above any other online service of its type. For those of us in the industry [...]

Here’s a first for Front Porch Forum (from Tracy in Westford, VT)…
We’d love to have a guest reader in the form of a big man in a red suit at the pajama story time at the library the evening of December 19th.  We’re in search of a Santa suit… if it comes complete with someone [...]

Michele and Tom posted the following note on their FPF neighborhood forum in Essex yesterday…
I would love to see the Forum used for sharing ideas and helping each other out with yardwork, household jobs that need an extra hand, and possibly even lending tools or coming with your tools to help a neighbor. Is anyone [...]

Lauren writes in today…
I just want to write and give my thanks for what you have created. The forum is great. For me it provides a sense of community and neighborliness that I didn’t think was possible to achieve anymore.
I am sure you have much evidence by now of the Forum actively changing [...]

Maps are important to neighborhood level online social networking.  From an announcement received today…
Placebase, Inc., the makers of the Pushpin online mapping platform, today announced a partnership with Urban Mapping Inc. (UMI), the leading provider of enhanced of local interactive content. As part of this agreement, Urban Mapping’s neighborhood boundary database will be available on [...]