Ideas

like the idea of local promotion! i guess it will help a lot to bring business opportunities to a particular locality!

I began working on this idea a few years ago and managed to get a lot of support from my local community. Unfortunately, the project lacked the necessary funding and has been gathering dust ever since.

Nevertheless, I consider this to be a "social imperative" to strengthen our local neighborhoods and communities through the power of the Web 2.0.

it is good! 5*

Thanks, cristi! I hope others see the benefit this would have for local retailers who are struggling in a market of corporate business.

I am aware of many local businesses in my area who are using MySpace, believing that they need to befriend Tom in order to appeal to the masses.

I'm also aware that most of these neighborhoods are looking for similar sites which display a list of businesses, local news, and a calendar of events.

An idea this simple would really fill a wide open niche in the market.

5* man. Good concept. Has the essence.

are local residents really dysfunctional this days?

3 stars....

The gap between individuals and the communities to which they belong has been steadily widening since the 1950s. While our technology has improved communication on a global scale, the act of talking with the guy the next cube over is an ever-increasing rarity in the 21st century.

The real effect is evident in our communities, where housing projects appear over-night in the fields outside a rural farming town, attracting half-a-million-dollar home buyers to the area for a decade or less, when the market has moved on to the next "big thing."

(Written solely from an American viewpoint.)

Does this mean that local residents are dysfunctional? No, but we are becoming steadily more "virtualized," leaving our sense of community and human bonding behind us in the wake of technological advancement. We can affect these changes if we have the will to do so...

With the help of Neighborwalk.com, of course!

Christopher,

I think this has been done: http://www.onmyblockdemo.ca/ and there is another out of MIT: http://www.i-neighbo.../news.php?newsview=2

Here is what the i-neighbours.org do:

"i-neighbors is a social networking service that connects people with other residents of in their local neighborhood. Unlike websites that encourage global, national, or city-wide communication, i-neighbors links members of local neighborhoods as defined by the people that create them. i-neighbors helps individuals, communities, and homeowner's associations build social capital by providing a place for neighbors to find each other, organize, share information and work together to address local problems. Our goal is to help people create neighborhoods that are safer, better informed, more trusting, and better equipped to deal with local issues. Founded in 2004 as a not-for-profit, advertising, and SPAM free service, i-neighbors now supports thousands of neighborhoods in all 50 of the United States and all 10 Canadian provinces. i-neighbors is operated as an ongoing experiment in community building by a team of faculty and students headed by Prof. Keith Hampton at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania."

many thanks bc!

i have no idea what's going on with the onmyblockdemo site, but the i-neighbors is absolutely wonderful... except for the fact that it really does nothing to promote the neighborhood.

i see i-neighbors as a perfect example of the back end that registered users could login and interact with one another. what is missing is the entire front end which displays all the local businesses, news, and events happening in the area.

might be a good idea to get ahold of them to see where they're going with the project!

I like it, I think its a great idea. The only problem I see is being able to get multiple neighborhoods invovled, would they each have their own site, or would it all be on one massive website? Also, even though this is the 21st century, not everyone has access or knows how to use the world wide web or a computer for that matter. It seems to me that usually an older more mature person is more concerned about their community (neighborhood watches), and why websites such as myspace and facebook are able to succeed is because they are focused on a younger generation. What do you think?

One competitor may have claimed the US zipcodes. I recently received a flier for a community site 20148.com. Didn't check it out; but, that is one way of addressing how you can easily find your community amongst multiple sites . Though populataions in area codes vary greatly and may be too restrictive or too broad for a 'community.'

one could spend a week gathering all the chamber of commerce sites which all follow the same format: businesses, events, local news, etc. they practically look identical when you see them all back to back. this shows a huge gap in the market for CH.com to fill.

i'm also aware of a number of companies that are honing in on this idea, similar to the site gwink posted. they all follow the same format as well, acting more like a hub of Internet advertising than anything the community could actually use.

as for the elderly: i'm believe that they're using specific services (such as email and ebay) but still see life from the local perspective. while this would obviously skew the data for general internet usage, i'm sure this would increase the chances of our grand parents visiting their local internet hub.

also, keep in mind that there are plenty of statistics leading to the success of this website. local businesses are appearing more frequently on myspace and facebook, and localized advertising on community websites is a veritable gold mine. assuming that the local organizations are going to promote their online identity, i'm thinking the old folks will come in their own time.

Neat! Was thinking about putting up a site for our neighborhood, but seemed like too much effort. ;]

ya, i learned what NOT to do in my experience: do NOT create a social network. the local business establishments are thrilled to have people signing in and commenting on their businesses -- as LONG as they have control.

they want their businesses and their events up front. focusing on the popular people and all their crazy conversations is something that takes place BEHIND the scenes, that is, BEHIND the local attractions. But..

There's also the community approach which is almost identical, except that communities want their houses and resident meetings and activities up front and center. Pretty much the same thing with a different focus. But..

You're right. It is a lot for one guy to handle. Thank CH for Crowdsourcing!

Nice idea. In our area one of the local real-estate agents hosts a site similar to this (message me if you are interested as I am not trying to promote them specifically). Such people are very well connected with both residents and businesses, and can usually afford to fund such things. Even though they compete amongst themselves, they are usually pretty neutral with respect to the rest of the community and as such do not bring bias to the service.

I like the concept and idea, primarily because like you we're forward thinking, innovative and all over Web 2.0, but know that one of the challenges you may face is that not everyone in the neighborhood is Web 2.0 savvy or even knows the term, and as a result getting participation at the neighbor level may require a lot of educating, time and energy.

If interests is high at the start but one neighbors sees another's lack of participation (because the latter is not up to speed on "participation"), does interest wane as might the network/website. From the B2C, I think local companies would be all over it.

I think a more predominately singles community would embrace your model, while more family oriented communities in typical suburbia carry a different dynamic (they have their own circle of friends within the hood they stay in touch with - at least that's the culture where I live - very few are outwardly friendly, families have a difficult time keeping up with their own social calendar much less a bigger picture community calendar, one block interacts well while another block nothing), and would be averse to using.

That said, can you tie in with an HOA? And since "walk" is part of the website's name would you consider a way to get the neighborhood to get outside of their home to participate. Maybe a touch screen just outside their mailbox, which are often clumpled together in one area. Just a thought. This would be a great fit for a recent event, "national night out." We received fyler in our mailbox for the meeting place and event (ice cream social), when a social network would have been more efficient.

I believe you'd have a tough road ahead of you predicting how the members of a community would use a website. When we throw the term around on the Internet it sounds like every community has a particular thing going for them -- mostly, because we do. Cambrians have big ideas, diggers dig Ron Paul, Warcrackers love Chuck Norris. The real world doesn't fit into those categories quite as easily.

Your best bet is to lay down a strong foundation: give the chamber of commerce, and the home owners associations, exactly what they're looking for: a list of places and reasons to come visit. All that "interaction stuff" provides good marketing, but really what they want is a way to promote their businesses that works in the 21st Century; one that they can both understand easily and afford on a limited budget.

Once they have what they're looking for, the site will spread throughout the community almost immediately. The businesses will post little clings on their windows, all the event flyers will have a link for more information, and eventually the individual businesses will begin posting links to their page on the website. Really, can you think of a more successful way to promote a business?

And all of that precludes the people even visiting the website.

I think this is a great idea and would be likely to use this service regularly, and I'm one of those people who don't use the other online social networking services much as they really seem to impersonal.

I think you come up with a template that is adjustable for the "neighborhood/community website administrator". You locate the people in communities and the chamber of commerces and whatnot and then sell them on the idea of using your template and services.

One of the major benefits would be that there would be a uniform network, so that people moving to a new community would 1) know where to go to find out about their community and 3) know how to navigate. This would benefit citizens, businesses and state & local government.

The trick for you is to come up with a template that is easy to use, covers the bases and can be adaptive to cultural/regional differences.

I mentioned this in another thread of yours, but check out Rivals.com. They've been extremely successful in the sports world by doing this very thing.

[QUOTE][B]On September 3, 2007, 12:03 pm fritzlanham said:[/B]

Glad you like the idea...hopefully that'll enhance the community. Welcome Wagons in neighborhoods, schools, etc would be great too. I know a lot of more upscale neighborhoods (more like communities themselves) advertise functions for neighbors to meet and socialize with one another. There may be a way to incorporate your business with what they are already trying to do. Some people are hesitant to meet others face-to-face, but would jump at the chance to meet others on-line first.

Another thought, and I haven't fleshed this out, is finding a way to brand this community. Something similar to Boar's Head, for example. "If it doesn't have the Boar's Head seal of approval, it's not...(I forget the rest :) ). You should get the idea, though. How can you brand the community so that people (businesses, co-workers, neighbors, classmates) would all want to join and use the network to their advantage? Every office, neighborhood, school, churches have people who want to reach out to others, but it's usually very loose knit. I'll think on this...

I like the idea and think it has potential, it's just a matter of getting that initial support.

I'm not sure if you're a sports fan or not, but Rivals.com is a well established sports network. They could be a model that you can study and potentially follow.

There were basically sports fans of various teams who started their own individual team websites. The fans came through word of mouth. Someone saw the potential and organized them into one large one-stop-shop for sports fans nationwide (network).

From what I know, they make money off of membership fees and advertising...at least intitially. You may have to start off small like they did, get a few advertising deals and when the time is right, charge for memberships.

There may be a chance that I can talk to someone from Rivals who would be willing share some of the history behind how they started, their intial start-up costs, problems, tips, etc.[/QUOTE]

@fritzlanham I've quoted your post from the forums as you've mentioned a couple great ideas that I'd like to have attached to original idea. The Welcome Wagon is one that I really did enjoy, and your "Community Branding" is another that I've talked about with others in the past.

In my community there are numerous bars and restaurants which receive a TON of advertising from local beer distributors. Practically anyone can walk into their offices downtown, hand them some artwork for a poster that has their logo on it somewhere, and get a stack printed absolutely free. This got us thinking about how valuable advertising would be to other companies (such as Boar's Head).

Unfortunately, when you stray from the "printed path" and start discussing new topics such as branded websites, things don't happen quite as easily. It is possible that we made things too complicated by asking for a few grand instead of simply bartering for trade. Still, I think that communities could earn a ton of money by simply branding their site with a skin (similar to Pandora.com).

Apparently quoting from the forums didn't work as well as expected!

Maybe you should focus on one specific feature what you can do in a village or city. For ecample be able to create only questionaires about a village. Give other an option to create the questionaires with pictures and fill them with pictures. People who create the questionaires can make money by using a SMS service, when you have all the answers right of this village the person who do the walk will win a mac donald coin. The website owner will make money with the sms service. ofcourse you can hook in some sponsors, by asking questions about a company in an area. I had launched this idea on the Idea forum already, Don't no the right name for it. Inthe Netherlands we call it Speurtochten. Search Hiking... Still don;t know the english word for it. Make it exciting for kids. Nice oppertunity for schools. Make a questionary about your environment and learn how you could make profit:-)

My apologize fot the spelling mistakes, I wish I could edit my words afterwards.

I had an idea for a neighborhood site. It's more a feature than a whole site, and could benefit from a social network to attach to.

The key feature: Request a particular business in your area (e.g. "We need a laundromat here", or "people like to eat healthy in this neighborhood, it would be a great location for a Pinkberry franchise").

It drives community participation because people are always talking about what they want in their neighborhood; so now they have somewhere to voice those opinions. Good for business owners too, who are looking for a location for a second store, or for mom and pop who want to start something and aren't sure what. And if you can assemble the data into reports, you might be able to sell it as credible market research.

Gorilla Marketing: Post signs on vacant store fronts "What business do YOU want here?"

A similiar situation lead to the original conception of the Neighborhood Network. My neighborhood resides in a historic district with an aging business strip on the edge. Most of the nightlife that made popular a number of bars and dance clubs have all but disappeared, leaving a few over-priced restaurants and porn shops in their place.

For this reason there has always been a huge divide between the businesses and the residents of our neighborhood. The one businesses that opened to serve the community -- a wine and deli that carries some of life's essentials -- never got any support from the neighborhood. Instead, the neighborhood continued to work against the businesses to limit the alcohol licenses, etc.

My hopes were that social networking tools could give everyone in the district a voice and enable people to come together to achieve their common goals. Unfortunately, this vision was much too idealistic, as well as being more technical than most were comfortable with. Even though the businesses were opening up shop on MySpace, few saw a reason to use the social network.

This is where the idea for a Neighborhood Network came from. Beginning with the websites that neighborhoods and local communities are constantly creating, and adding the network tools of the Web 2.0, businesses end up with something they need at a lower price, and residents are empowered as never before.