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Beyond Local Listings: Can you bring real local communities online?
By Kirby Winfield | November 13, 2007
It’s been said that individuals today are increasingly disconnected from their communities. They are “bowling alone”; i.e., although the number of people who bowl has increased in the last 20 years, the number of people that bowl in leagues has decreased. Since people bowl alone they do not participate in social interaction and civic discussions that might occur in a league environment.
The Internet has been criticized for its isolating impact on society. In many cases increased engagement in online activities results in exacerbation of the “bowling alone” phenomenon.
There is a huge market void in local online media. With the exception of business search/reviews, no one has solved for community connection and conversation at the neighborhood or town level at scale. This brings me to the opportunity of “digitizing local.”
Some of the most passionate and well informed citizens in the country still communicate about their communities through print newsletters, in person meetings, and other offline means. These people thrive on being active locally. If you can somehow harness their knowledge, energy, and networks, you can create a vast forum of local influencers and relevant evergreen local content.
Imagine an Internet destination that provides frequent, relevant, unique commentary about local issues, businesses, and events from dedicated and passionate members of each local community in the United States. Whether posting pictures or words about schools, businesses, homes, safety, taxes, or other key local topics, contributors will create a grassroots movement where communities can benefit from the shared knowledge and insights of their members.
Since its beginnings, the Web has primarily been used to allow people to connect with information, products, or other people or communities that they could not access in the physical world. This only fulfills part of the promise of the online revolution. Consider the saying “think global, act local”: the Web has only solved the “global” half of the equation so far.
Topics: Blogging, Community, Content |
November 13th, 2007 at 5:13 pm
[…] Kirby Winfield offers a good post today, for as far as it goes, about helping people connect to their local communities through the internet… It’s been said that individuals today are increasingly disconnected from their communities. They are “bowling alone”; i.e., although the number of people who bowl has increased in the last 20 years, the number of people that bowl in leagues has decreased. Since people bowl alone they do not participate in social interaction and civic discussions that might occur in a league environment. […]
November 13th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
After owning and developing “local .com’s” for the last 12 years it nice to see the focus getting to how the net works for local.
November 14th, 2007 at 9:29 am
[…] Beyond Local Listings: Can you bring real local communities online? […]
November 14th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
I have a local website (network) that appears to fulfill many of your points.
It has local news, what’s on, forum etc. as well as business directory.
Does this fill the gap? (If not, I would welcome suggestions.)
www.ashfieldfocus.com
November 19th, 2007 at 10:52 am
The problem is that the market is very very fragmented with 100,000’s sites all trying to do the same thing. Normally run by individuals with their own views, none are joined together. Only a google search reveals some information though they cannot cope with serving up relevant local information. When I did a search for butcher ashfield on google uk, it came up with 16,000 results. David may know how many butchers there are. Less than 20 I bet. Hairdresser comes up with 52,800 results! So everyone accepts this information as no one else can be bothered to collect and display what is really there.