Not hyperlocal ... Hyper-Me
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- This entry was written on July 4, 2008.
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So, the Wall Street Journal finally came out and declared LoudounExtra.com to be a “flop” … and I say, let this be the death-knell for hyperlocal.
LoudounExtra has a lot of issues: leaving out the hyper in hyperlocal, not allowing easy user interaction and contribution, an overwrought design (and yes I’m one to talk), a non-local team in charge, a lack of actual community outreach and a lack of actual promotion, but in the end, doing these neighborhood sites will never “move the needle” (to borrow a recent Curley phrase).
The fact of the matter is, most folks don’t care about their communities that much … they care about niches. Now, some of those niches might *be* communities, they might be interests, or they might be what the people they know are up to. The fact of the matter is, you and I don’t know what other people’s niches might be.
So, play to the niches … and let the user define and create those niches. And we play to those niches by making all (and I mean all) of our content sortable to an atomic level. Let the user create their own social hub around an interest, a community or their buddies and give them the ability to use our content to drive their sites.
What’s this require of us: metadata. We need deep, available metadata on every stitch of content we produce. Addresses on everything, subjects on everything and a way to pull objects (stories, photos, videos) by that metadata. Then we need to expose it to the public. That’s it. Quit trying to control the order of stories, or trying to decide which story is “important.”
Finally, we need to give normal folks a framework to consume those objects – a way for them to say, “Give me the news five miles around my house, the Colts stories and the photos that my friends upload.”
And give them a way to create social hubs around those same objects, a group of users who really care about Broad Ripple, Colts tight end Dallas Clark or local breweries. And let them pick which bits of your content they want to congregate around. And let them add their own content as they wish. Heck, let them add other people’s content if they want (but be kind, send traffic their way, too, and don’t claim it as your own).
Think of a Ning, powered by local content and local people. A spoked wheel of niches aggregated in one intensely local spot.
And expect to see it around October …