In the last decade, I've watched a number of hyper-local online communities struggle in vain to find a viable business model. Big players such as Microsoft Sidewalk, WashingtonPost.com's "On Washington," eneighbors.com, restonevillage.org, and other small entrepreneurial ventures started with great expectations and either fell flat or didn't meet expectations. I launched Etakoma.com with modest expectations, modest investment of time, and it has managed to survive.
We've had a great deal of success in certain neighborhoods of Takoma Park creating SOCIAL CAPITAL through Yahoo-based neighborhood listservs, as I've documented here: more than half the homeowners in some neighborhoods subscribe to a daily email list. The lists are quite active, and enhance the sense of neighborhood and community. The explosion of blogging gives Etakoma.com an opportunity to serve as a local blog aggregator, with frequent if not daily updates from the Takoma blogosphere.
But growth in awareness of Etakoma.com, and participation into the entire community of 20,000 have been stymied without the resources to make this more than an avocation of a few people, nor without partners such as local newspapers or broadcast outlets. Takoma Park is too small to attract these big fish. They would only be interested in a network of community sites in the Washington area.
Takoma's online community has been fragmented, as it is difficult to move the discussion from elists to a centralized web site such as www.etakoma.com. Investing a lot of time to sell ongoing ads to advertisers in such a small community as Takoma Park, which does not even have its own yellow pages, is questionable, though we've had a very positive response from local businesses receptive to initial sponsorship.
Similar grassroots ventures such as http://www.local2me.org in the San Francisco bay area have had similar success and similar frustrations.
Rob Hof described the need for "really local content" in a Business Week blog. Ross Mayfield pinpointed the classic problem of local media "is the cost of production relative to the scale of distribution. You can’t send reporters to every Little League game and only a subset of the local community is interested in the coverage."
Backfence.com, which opened in the spring to hoopla in media circles, is attempting to overcome the obstacles in creating hyper-local media with its new, proprietary "social software" platform, using Infousa.com, a database vendor, charging for listing in an online yellow pages, charging for online display advertising, and by charging businesses for classified advertisements (classifieds for individuals are free, at least initially). Backfence recently acquired $3 million in venture capital to expand. Peter Krasilovsky has a good assessment of Backfence's progress on his "localonliner" blog:
"To be sure, I tend to root for these kinds of “feel good” services, having consulted for a number of them," he writes. "But is a “tipping point” really at hand? It isn’t really evident. While the Backfence sites aren’t ghost towns, they are very under-populated. It is going to take some real traction for them to compete against more established companies like The Washington Post and SuperPages, as well as Internet-based community sites such as AOL City Guide, Insider Pages and Judy’s Book."
The potential for partnership between online yellow pages and local community sites (and online newspapers) would seem to be strong. More than one out of five adults say "the computer" has replaced their use of yellow pages, Krasilovsky reports.
One frustration in moving beyond Yahoo listservs for neighborhoods and civic organization, to hyper-local web sites is that users will not routinely "go get" content. If you build it, they will not come. This may change if syndication, or RSS feeds, incorporated into the latest version of Internet Explorer, becomes widely used. (Yahoo Groups are already available in RSS, and I've started to syndicate Yahoo groups and blogs on www.etakoma.com). One next step is to encourage users to download the home page onto their desktop, and (assuming they have a broadband connection) get in the habit of clicking on it at least daily.
Syndication of Backfence content is not yet available. Despite Backfence's founders' hope that it would become the "cable news" of the towns it has entered, with constant, citizen-generated content, Backfence's sites do not appear to be updated constantly, even daily. The Alarmclock blog is skeptical of Backfence, asserting in a "Notinmybackyard.com" post that Backfence's site traffic is feeble. Certainly several Yahoo neighborhood-based listservs in Takoma Park have deeper penetration and get more participation than the Backfence web sites. Alarmclock notes that Judysbook.com, "your friends' yellow pages," trounces Backfence.com in traffic. In fairness, Judysbook appeals to a far broader geographical area. http://local.yahoo.com also seems to be eliciting posts on its interactive yellow pages.
But these sites do not even attempt the kind of neighborhood-based interchange of the Etakoma listservs that really enhance face-to-face community, or what Backfence aspires to. I've long contended that the neighborhood-networking movement will succeed when the newspaper industry embraces it. But the newspaper industry isn't likely to embrace it until someone shows or demonstrates the money to be made.
My advice to Backfence is to either syndicate local Yahoo group content, and/or try hard to create and promote neighborhood-based email networks. My advice to Yahoo or its subcontractors is to aggregate neighborhood-based and civic listservs with blogs and local advertising, into genuinely local sites. My advice to the newspaper industry is to take more risk, and invest real money into neighborhood networking, not only because of the financial possibilities, but because of the social good you can create in your communities.
The neighborhood networking movement will be successful when half of the citizens, or at least half the homeowners, in neighborhoods willingly receive, read and participate in discussions, blogs, or information exchange, that truly strengthen face-to-face community. I'm sure that day will come eventually.
The organization that succeeds at that will have big media companies banging at its door, to either buy it out or purchase the formula...if there is a formula for "community."
