Breaking News City Sites for the Hyperlocal Community
Our first hyperlocal community Breaking News city sites are being launched. Here is Susie Blackmon's Breaking Asheville News:
Although we have been launching Breaking News city sites in metro areas like Boston and Toronto, we believe Breaking News city sites will be far more effective engaging hyperlocal communities of 50,000-100,000 population, whether suburban, exurban or in the middle of the plains. Why? Community is local, and community networks work best when there is intimacy and tight friendships among its members. Real estate agents know that, and focus on networking within the communities where they live, by church, softball league, PTA or civic organizations like Realtor Associations.
We're in the process of building Breaking News city sites in smaller cities like Reno, Chico, The Woodlands, Greenville NC, Hamilton, ONT, Irvine, Santa Barbara, etc. Kevin Boer has put together a detailed, easy to use tutorial that gets a Breaking News city site up in 4-5 hours (including research on the best local feeds to use), and we're starting a new webinar series this week to teach the development process. Once the City Site is up, you run it as a community service that helps tie your neighbors and your own network together that requires little maintenance.
Let me know via @Twitter or comment if you think this is interesting.
For recent discussion on the future of how communities will interact within hyperlocal sites, Tim White, developer of Breaking Boston News.com, has pointed me to these articles:
From PBS MediaShift: Building the Ideal Community Information Hub
Although we have been launching Breaking News city sites in metro areas like Boston and Toronto, we believe Breaking News city sites will be far more effective engaging hyperlocal communities of 50,000-100,000 population, whether suburban, exurban or in the middle of the plains. Why? Community is local, and community networks work best when there is intimacy and tight friendships among its members. Real estate agents know that, and focus on networking within the communities where they live, by church, softball league, PTA or civic organizations like Realtor Associations.
We're in the process of building Breaking News city sites in smaller cities like Reno, Chico, The Woodlands, Greenville NC, Hamilton, ONT, Irvine, Santa Barbara, etc. Kevin Boer has put together a detailed, easy to use tutorial that gets a Breaking News city site up in 4-5 hours (including research on the best local feeds to use), and we're starting a new webinar series this week to teach the development process. Once the City Site is up, you run it as a community service that helps tie your neighbors and your own network together that requires little maintenance.
Let me know via @Twitter or comment if you think this is interesting.
For recent discussion on the future of how communities will interact within hyperlocal sites, Tim White, developer of Breaking Boston News.com, has pointed me to these articles:
From PBS MediaShift: Building the Ideal Community Information Hub
From Publishing 2.0: Retraining Wire and Feature Editors to be Web CuratorsSocial media consultant and former Yahoo marketer Ryan Kuder said he liked EveryBlock, but thinks its focus on larger cities needs to be customized for smaller communities:
We need to allow neighborhoods to curate and share their own information and discuss the things that are more important to them. More like Twitter or Tumblr than Topix or Outside.in...By enabling communities to centralize the discussion around local issues and share the news and content that is most important to them, you'll get more interaction between neighbors, which leads to stronger, more active neighborhoods.
Comments