Tips on Starting an Online Community Site
On the FeverBee blog, Richard Millington shares some tips on Start An Online Community For Your Street. It’s good stuff that any hyperlocal blogger can learn from.
His tips include getting your neighbors involved early on — talk to them to identify important issues, seed your local site with some content, and then invite everyone to comment and/or write their own pieces. He suggests having meetups to further develop your community site and the interaction among neighbors.
Why does all this matter?
If you want to clean up the litter in your street, don’t grab a broom, build the bonds between members so they wont drop litter on your street. It serves to reason, if you want to improve the value of your home, you should increase the social capital of your street. You can do this easier than ever with online tools.
That’s good stuff. The full post isn’t long – click on over now and check it out.
Welcome SearchFest Attendees
If you’re reading this while at the SearchFest conference, a big welcome to you. Thanks for visiting HyperlocalBlogger.com. In my presentation, I mention the four real estate blogs that my wife and I co-author, but I don’t provide the URLs. If you’re looking for those and want to check them out after the session, here are the links:
Richland Real Estate Blog
Kennewick Real Estate Blog
Pasco Real Estate Blog
West Richland Real Estate Blog
The individual blog posts I referenced in the presentation are these (in order):
Richland Circuit City = A Zoo
Leann Rimes coming to TRAC
George Prout Pool Closing Soon for the Summer
Richland Concert Series at John Dam Park
If you have any questions or feedback about my presentation or the session in general, feel free to leave a comment below. There’s also a Contact button at the top of the page. I’d love to hear from you!
NY Times Goes Hyperlocal … But Does It Change Anything?
Hot on the heels of my recent post about everyone getting the hyperlocal religion, the New York Times jumped in these waters with its own experiment in hyperlocal blogging: The Local.
The Local is, for now, two blogs covering suburban areas in northern New Jersey, outside of NYC. Tina Kelley is one of the primary bloggers for The Local, and she introduced the project here, promising what looks like a heavy emphasis on news-based local blogging:
The foundation of The Local will be local news, both breaking and simmering. We intend to ferret out the kind of information that my journalism training and 20 (yikes!) years in the news business has prepared me to find. I have my whole work day, plus a press card, to devote to getting answers for you.
Reactions:
Alan Wolk took the Times to task for, among other things, trying to cover three towns with one local blog. Note that Cari and I faced a similar issue of coverage and decided to start four separate blogs. (At the moment, the link to Alan’s blog above leads to an empty page, but you can read the post from the home page still.)
Cory Bergman was one of the local bloggers that The Times consulted, and he says they ignored the advice about launching the blogs on separate, non-branded domains. Both of the new Times blogs are on sub-domains of blogs.nytimes.com, and both clearly show the Times logo.
My Reaction?
I continue to feel that almost any experiment like this that introduces the concept of local blogging to more people is good for all of us. The Times has enormous reach, and no doubt thousands of new people are now aware of what we do.
I also agree with both Alan’s and Cory’s suggestions above. I even question their decision to put The Local on a URL that has the word “marketing” in it:
Is this about community and connections, or is it about marketing? This is one reason I don’t think a Big Newspaper has what it takes to win at local blogging. It’s not about marketing — not directly. It’s not about scale and reach and access and brand name. It’s about neighbors and passion and all the mundane stuff that happens on your block that really doesn’t matter to anyone but you. It’s about people like Steve Sherron getting Hyperlocalbloggeritus. I think the successful local blogs will come from the street, not from the company boardroom.
What think you?
(Now) 43 Local Blog Directories
Can you help with this post? I’ve put together this list of (currently) 33 43 blog directories where a hyperlocal blogger might want to be listed and linked. Some require payment; some are free. Important: I am certainly not vouching for all of these; some I wouldn’t want our local blogs to come anywhere near! But it’s still a starting place.
Please spread this post around by email, Twitter, social media, however … and invite anyone who’s into local blogging to use the comments to add local blog directories that I’m missing.
Specific Regions
(I’m certain there must be tons more of these….)
Washington Post has a directory of DC-area blogs
CityPages.com has a directory of Minnesota blogs
Minnesota.com has one, too
Newsbobber.com also has a Minnesota blog directory
NYC Bloggers
Austin (TX) Stories
DFW Blogs (Dallas/Ft. Worth) – seems out-of-date or dead
San Diego Bloggers – ditto
Search Maryland blog directory
Paducah (KY) iBlog Directory
Lowcountry Bloggers lists a lot of Charleston, SC, area blogs
LocalMouth’s British Blog Map – pretty cool!
Best Blogs Asia
Boston Weblogs
Boston Blogs
Citizen Rain – aggregator of Seattle neighborhood blogs
Hartford Blogs, from the Hartford Public Library
BayNewsNetwork, from UC Berkeley’s Knight Digital Media Center
Oakland Local blog directory
Local Blog Directories
Outside.in – a blog directory mashed up with local media content
PlaceBlogger
Blogs by City – looks like it hasn’t been updated since 2005 (sheesh)
feedmap.net – spammers have ahold of this one
Loaded Web
WikiCity – technically not a local blog directory, but a wiki-based collection of city guides that invites local bloggers to add themselves to a city blogroll
InOtherNews.us – directory that lists only local news/journalism blogs/sites across the U.S.
General Blog Directories
Best of the Web has a Regional category in its directory.
Blogged.com also has regional listings.
EatonWeb Local News blogs – looks like a strong page
Blog Catalog
Blog Digger
Bloggapedia offers a regional blog directory.
Bloggeries, too.
Blogarama has a “community blog” directory, but a couple thousand blogs are all piled into this one category. How about some regional categories there, blogarama? (And you, too, Blog Explosion.)
Geeky Speaky
LSBlogs – scroll down and look for “By Location” in the left nav column
Globe of Blogs
Blog Universe
Blog Flux
Blog Hub
Blog Hints
Grokodile
Regator: Local Interest blogs
Now it’s your turn to add more in the comments, and I’ll update this post accordingly.
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