Front Porch Forum on YouTube
I guess Front Porch Forum has arrived… we’re now on YouTube!
Special thanks to CCTV Channel 17 (Meghan O’Rourke, Sam Mayfield and Lauren-Glenn Davitian) and the dozens of local folks who appear in the clip.
Supply and Demand says Building Community has Huge Potential
Front Porch Forum is in the business of helping neighbors connect and build community within their neighborhood. Some folks ask me “that’s not a business… why didn’t you form FPF as a nonprofit?”
Fair enough. Front Porch Forum is mission driven, like all nonprofits. But it’s also competing in a new and vibrant [...]
Yelp, Local Online Leader, worth $200M?
TechCrunch reported this week…
Yelp, the popular local review site, will soon announce a new $15 million dollar round of financing led by DAG Ventures. The valuation is rumored to be in the $200 million range. Yelp says that they will be using the money to expand geographically, add onto their sales team, and establish an [...]
Online Ad Spending
Greg Sterling reports this week…
The IAB reported its estimate that 2007 saw 25% growth in online ad revenues for a total of $21.1 billion vs. $16.9 billion in 2006. You can expect the distributions to be similar to 2006:
Search — 41%
Display — 32%
Classifieds [...]
Robert Putnam to Speak at UVM
Robert Putnam will speak at the University of Vermont on April 28, 2008, sharing a lecture titled “Civic Engagement in a Diverse and Changing America.”
Putnam’s Bowling Alone was a ground-breaker documenting the decline of many facets of American community life. Steve Yelvington writes about Putnam briefly this week… here.
Rich Gordon writes in more detail [...]
What’s the demand for neighborliness?
Various entrepreneurial gurus (Marc Andreessen, Paul Buchheit) point, when asked for the most important ingredient for a start-up, to the market. That is, it doesn’t matter how clever your technology is, or your marketing, or how brilliant your team is if there is no demand for what you provide. If you’re working in a market [...]
Crime Data by Neighborhood
Great data available from the Portland, OR police department… crime statistics by neighborhood.
I’ve looked at the crime log for my city (Burlington, VT) and, regrettably, the data isn’t presented in a way that is very useful to the interested homeowner. I assume that the data is collected to help the police do their job, more [...]
Conventional Neighborhood Online Message Board
Some people outside of our pilot area may think that Front Porch Forum provides conventional online message boards for neighborhoods… not so. Here’s an example of a straight-forward web-based threaded message board from a Seattle neighborhood… click here. That’s a different animal.
Mapping Neighborhood Boundaries and Names
Adena Schutzberg writes in Directions Magazine about three different efforts to provide neighborhood data for GIS… Maponics, Urban Mapping, Inc., and Zillow. This article touches on several issues for each of these companies…
Collecting and cleaning up initial data for neighborhood boundaries and names.
Fuzziness of boundaries.
Macro vs. sub-neighborhoods.
Ongoing QA/QC.
Business model.
Advice for Local Online Entrepreneurs
Andy Sack, founding CEO of now-shuttered Judy’s Book, offers this advice for folks looking to get traction in the “local reviews and word of mouth referrals business”…
i) GET TO CRITICAL MASS
Do this by limiting geography — stay in one geography for 3 years. Yes, 3 years. Do not expand geography for the first 36 [...]