hyper_local - Yule Heibel on Diigo

09 Mar 09

Hello, My Name Is Steve And I Have Hyperlocalbloggeritus

Blog post by Steve Sherron on why and how to do hyperlocal blogging.
QUOTE
"...I am convinced that my best chance for success is going to be in my local market. I have discovered since I began this journey that local folks are starving for attention and publicity for their business or organization. Most do not understand SEO. Few have web sites. There is a gap and a need just waiting to be filled."
UNQUOTE
Interesting tips on SEO etc.

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My main concern from day one has been to research and select a few keywords and keyword phrases and start building content. Google found my site immediately and now I’m slowly ranking for my selected keywords. I’ve managed to rank #1 for a few longtail keywords.
My hometown paper does not do such a hot job covering local news and events. This lack of coverage creates an opportunity for a hyperlocal blogger: Who is covering your local Crime Stoppers BBQ? Who is covering your local weather events?
3 more annotations...
- I published my first local article on December 4, 2008. By January 11, 2009, I had published my 30th article. On January 12th, I find my web site on three locations on page two of Google for my targeted keywords. I’m not an SEO Doctor by any stretch of the imagination. If I can do this, so can you.
- In this short amount of time, I have received great support from my community. I’ve had three separate inquiries about advertising on my site. I recently received an e-mail from our mayor thanking me for my National Guard article and video. One of our city councilmen contacted me and is interested in involving me in some work for the city. I’m happy with my progress in such a short time. I must confess though, I still do not have an actual plan mapped out yet. However, my direction is becoming a little more focused. Having Hyperlocalbloggeritus is starting to be cool.
- My advice to you is to go local. Believe me, your community is starving for coverage. Doors will open for you. Just start posting, using your local community keywords and phrases. Tell your friends, family and neighbors that you have been struck with the disease. The word will get out. Print up some business cards and hand them out everywhere you go. Come out of the closet.

12 Aug 08

Voices From the Suburban Blogosphere, by Bob Tedeschi - NYTimes.com

Article that chronicles the role of blogging in the creation of new hyper local / local news eco-systems.
QUOTE:
For readers, the blogs are providing news in ways unseen in traditional local news media.
(...)
Like other journalists who run news sites, Paul Bass, New Haven Independent’s editor, does not consider himself a blogger.

“We’re a news site,” Mr. Bass said.

To underscore the difference, Mr. Bass said the site has three full-time reporters and one part-time reporter, all paid for by $185,000 in grants, corporate sponsorships and private donations. The site’s coverage, he added, helped remove a city budget director, change city towing policies and shame board of education members into better attendance, after it publicized the fact that the board’s truancy dwarfed that of city students.

“A lot of neighborhood boards weren’t covered until we came around, so we’re just showing up,” Mr. Bass said. “That’s the promise of hyperlocal journalism, as opposed to blogging.”
UNQUOTE

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nyt blogging hyper_local local_news placeblogging

01 Aug 08

outside.in » The outside.in Guide to Great Local Blogging

Chrysanthe Tenentes of outside.in put together a useful "guide to great local blogging" in 6 easy-to-follow points.

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outside.in hyper_local local_news blogging

Go where big media doesn’t. Nothing is too local.
Be as specific as possible when talking about places. Give them accurate names
6 more annotations...
- Connect with your neighbors and other local bloggers. Share ideas with other bloggers and leave comments on their site.
- Post early and often, or at least regularly.
- Be timely. Break stories. You can cover news way before local media sources pick up on stories.
- Tag your posts. Use relevant subject, place and (most importantly!) location tags so that your content is easily searchable and identifiable.
- When you write about local issues, places or people, tag with the most specific geographic information (address is best, but use a zip code or neighborhood name if your post is about a more general area).
- Use your stats to your advantage

16 Jul 08

Crosscut Seattle - The founder of ArtsJournal talks about arts and new media

Much to think on in this great interview by James Bash with Douglas McLennan, the founder of ArtsJournal. "Curation" is definitely my word du jour -- I've seen it come up again and again recently, in relation to *very* different products and businesses (clothing & retail, for example).

It leads me to think that "curation" is something that's evolving out of "filtering," which in turn was something that sort of / kind of evolved out of (or related to) "gatekeeping."

The latter always struck me as something almost hateful, in the sense that gatekeepers protected the various walled gardens to which access was limited or even forbidden. Gatekeepers weren't there for me, they were there for "them."

Filtering in turn proposed the notion that users (me, we) should set their own parameters -- it's potentially democratic, anyway, provided we don't let overlords filter for us. DIY filtering can be smart, letting us develop efficiencies in how we access and consume information. But filtering done by censors is bad.

Curation can be equally two-edged (like filtering), but it now introduces another aspect: perhaps trust? Some sort of acknowledgement of expertise, or sophistication? Good curation, however, done on a digital platform, is open, accessible, democratic, and transparent.

Perhaps curation is an open, acknowledged re-insertion of the human aspect -- which "filtering" can strive to eliminate via automatic settings and controls.

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crosscut artsjournal douglas_mclennan blogging business curating curation filtering hyper_local

The good thing about ArtsJournal is that it's a curated service. We define what the territory is and then pick out the most interesting things. The curation aspect of ArtsJournal is its strength, but it is also a weakness because the curation reflects mostly my taste.
As users have more access to more information on the Web, the sheer amount becomes overwhelming. So increasingly you have to depend on curators — other people — to find the good stuff that you want to see over time. So you find the curator whom you trust. That way, you have a way to navigate through a lot of information.
6 more annotations...
- The value of a service like ArtsJournal is that it looks a great number of things and with curators, it narrows it down to manageable numbers. But when you start adding more and more, then the curation changes. It may be easy for people to look at 20 stories every day, because they have time for that, but if you give them 30 stories, that takes more commitment. So the challenge is how do we make it easy to offer a lot of information and keep it highly curated enough to so that it is valuable for people who appreciate our judgment in choosing one thing over another.
  The idea with the blog is to expand it to hundreds of bloggers, ultimately. But we have to install more curation. With 50 blogs there’s more to offer people. With 200 we have to curate it, to get the best of the best. Every time you add something you have to add another grade of curation.
  The kind of mystery here is that as arts journalism disappears out of the traditional media, what replaces it, and how do you build a business model that supports people to do blogs? How do critics on the Web make enough money to sustain themselves? If you had a big network of arts blogs and sell advertising across it, advertisers are able to leverage the content that the bloggers provide across a lot of platforms, and then there’s a business model that emerges that can support someone to earn money from writing an arts blog.
- The critical mass if you are a stand-alone is probably 4,000 to 5,000 visitors a day, which very few arts blogs get. This is a very targeted and valuable audience. However, even if you have a blog that gets 300 to 400 people a day, there are advertisers who would love to reach those people. You might get a small advertiser to advertise on a blog that gets 300 visitors a day, but put that blog together with 50 other blogs and you are looking at selling thousands of views of that ad every day, then suddenly the pool of advertisers who want to reach that highly targeted audience increases enormously.
- Newspapers have not been the newspapers that I remember for quite a number of years now. The day of many competing papers and views in a city is gone. But the classic newspaper model was not built on a mass-media vehicle. It was a collection niches. People don’t buy a newspaper because of its coverage of city hall. They buy it for the comics section or the crossword puzzle, etc. After they get through their favorite thing, they will read the city hall coverage. But the genius of this model is that none of the niche contents can support themselves, but if you aggregated them altogether, then you have enough readers and enough revenue to sell to advertisers.
- In the '60s, '70s, and '80s, the newspapers increasingly looked to TV as the mass media model. The mass market mentality is not niches at all. It is not excellence of product as the key to success. The mass market strategy is to find the place in the middle so that what you produce appeals to the most people. Editors I worked with at newspapers told me to write at an eighth grade reading level — the mythical, average, mass-market consumer. As soon as you do that, and when you assume that every person ought to be able to read every story in a newspaper, then you are not talking to those who are interested in the niches. Then the classical music reviews in a given city are not intended for people who know a lot about classical music. They are pitched to those who don’t know much. So you end up getting this content that isn’t very good. It isn’t very satisfying to the audience that ought to be your core audience, and you get this erosion of leadership of arts coverage.
- Also, newspapers have never been able to cover community arts in an interesting way. Things like dance or jazz get really minimal coverage. However, now with the ease and the different ways that you can deliver information, we may discover a new model and improve the way that we cover culture. Right now we are in between the two models. The old one no longer works and the new one hasn’t been established.
  Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I just spent a week in North Carolina with dance critics from around the nation. Like music, dance is hard to write about. You are trying to describe things that are not easy to describe. What would happen if we tried to describe an event in a new way? I broke them into three teams, and signed them up with blogger accounts, and gave them a Flip video camera, which has a convenient USB port with which to upload movies to You Tube. I asked them to use the video to compare dance styles, or show what you mean, or talk to critics, the audience, or the choreographer. So they had a day and a half to expand the palette on which they are working, to find something that is not so linear in form with which to describe this artistic experience.
- People in Seattle say that we are one of the best regional orchestras in the country. That may be true, but when you look at the dynamic cities in the U.S. — the places where things really happen — you don’t think of that for Seattle or Portland when you think of the orchestra world. Why is that? What is the missing ingredient that prevents that from happening?
  In Seattle, we have this great concert hall. That’s not to say that the Seattle Symphony is a bad orchestra. I just wonder if the ambition for them is not sufficient. Cleveland or Pittsburgh (among the top orchestras in the country) are not in communities that you would think can support such orchestras. Cleveland has lost half of its population in the last 20 years. But the Cleveland Orchestra continues to be a major, major orchestra.
  The ambition to really excel at the first level has not been in Seattle or Portland. Maybe people here are so far away from major arts cities that they have nothing truly first-rate to compare our arts organizations with. But it is just strange, given the money, education, and arts involvement of this region, that the orchestras in Seattle and Portland have been left behind.