We’re not exactly the Lads from Liverpool, but you wouldn’t know it from the reaction of some women I met last night.  I showed up late for an event here in Silicon Valley and the room was already starting to thin out.  I was talking to a few women when they asked what I did.  When I described Neighborsville to them, they started jumping up and down and clapping and making “wheee” noises, then they hugged me.  Hunh?  I mean we’re excited about Neighborsville too, but I don’t think I’ve ever screamed “Wheee!” (OK, maybe once).

Turns out that one of the women is the Planning Commissioner for Menlo Park and another was the president of the Suburban Park HOA, a neighborhood in Menlo Park.  They had just had a meeting the night before to discuss how to bring their neighborhood online because it’s getting increasingly difficult for them to talk to everyone in the neighborhood.  They talked about Yahoo groups or Google or an email list of some sort, but each of the solutions came up short for some reason or another.  What they wanted was an easy to maintain website that they didn’t have to do much with where their neighbors could share information, events, and thoughts about what was going on around the neighborhood.

Suburban Park HOA, I think we can help.

We’re sitting on a big list of categories for businesses that don’t really mean very much to most users.  We’re working on translating those categories into useful information.  That’s where you come in.  For example, is the category “51980103 - Enamels” supposed to be Home and Garden?  Or maybe it’s Painters.  You decide.

We’ve set up the Neighborsville version of a Mechanical Turk to sort things out and if you’re the person who categorizes the most, we’ll send you a $50 Starbucks Gift Card to say thanks.  So if you’re bored at work and want to do some mind numbing repetitive tasks in exchange for a caffeine fix, just click here to help us out.

Neighborsville will be eternally grateful.

It’s a big day for Neighborsville!  We’re entering limited beta today.  What does that mean?  It means we’re going to start inviting some neighbors from our first neighborhood to come on in and have a look around. Our goal with this limited beta is to work out some of the kinks and get feedback from real users to help us shape the Neighborsville product.

Our first neighborhood will be Willow Glen in San Jose, CA.  Willow Glen is a historic neighborhood just south of downtown San Jose first settled in the 1860s.   Tree lined streets and craftsman and cottage houses built in the early 1900s give the neighborhood small town character in an otherwise big city atmosphere.  Lincoln Avenue, Willow Glen’s main street, is lined with locally owned businesses and restaurants.  It’s the perfect place for us to test out Neighborsville.

Neighbors will be able to find their friends, create relationships with their neighbors, contribute to the community blog, and share local events with one another.  We’ll be adding more features in the coming weeks and rolling out to new neighborhoods soon.  If you’d like to be notified when Neighborsville is available for your neighborhood, stop by Neighborsville and give us your email address and zip code and we’ll drop you a note.

Ork Posters has a great line of posters depicting the neighborhoods in big American cities.  It’s a great way to visualize the neighborhoods.  My personal favorite?  The Screaming Yellow Brooklyn…

The kisok at the center of local information.

I’ve read Russell’s post, When Will Local Truly Be Local On The Web, over and over. Russell gives the best description of the problem with online local information that I’ve seen yet. He’s online all day, but in spite of that, his online experience generally tells him nothing about what’s going on around him.  This kiosk that he snapped near his house gives him a much better idea about what’s going on his neighborhood than he can find anywhere online.

What is it about the kiosk that makes is such a great source of information?  I’ve broken it down to the three P’s of Local:  1.  Proximity.  2.  Priority.  3.  Public.

Proximity

The kiosk is at the center of town.  It’s near the library, the park, the community center and the police station.  If you live here, you can’t help but stumble past the kiosk.  It’s at the center of your local life.  There’s no online source that is at the center of your local life.  There are lots of sites that touch on it, but they’re all skirting around the edges.  How does a website become the hub for everything that is local for you?  Where do you put it so that people who live in a neighborhood know that they’ve got a go to source for everything that they need for local information where they can go to every day and constantly find fresh information?

Priority

The newest stuff is always on top.  When someone ads a flyer to the kiosk, it covers something that’s older and therefore less relevant (at least in theory).  You can tell how important something is by how big it is, the quality of the paper, and the professionalism of the design.  The flyer for the big wine festival is big and nice and on quality paper while the announcement about the garage sale is copied on office paper.  The longer an item is on the kiosk, the more faded it gets from the sun and the weather.  Just by glancing at the kiosk, you get a feel for the priority of a piece of information and this all happens naturally.

Public

Anyone can post anything on the kiosk.  And it’s easy to do.  Just print up your flyer, walk down to the kiosk with your staple gun, and BAM.  You’ve posted.  You don’t need to get a permit or maintain a website or pay a fee, you can just post.  Whatever you want, whenever you want.  And it’s simple.

The holy grail for the local internet is to be the kiosk.  Be accessible to the people in the neighborhood, show them what the neighborhood considers important, and make it easy for people to add information.

At Neighborsville, we’re building a neighborhood service that will be your local kiosk.  It will be accessible to all of your neighbors.  You’ll be able to find things in the course of your day by searching for them on Google, visiting your favorite websites like Facebook or Yahoo or just stopping by.  We’ll make it easy for you to add whatever you want to Neighborsville that you think will be interesting to your neighbors, and your neighbors can help you determine what are the most important bits of information that you should know about.

Our mission is to be your local kiosk.  If you were building your neighborhood’s local kiosk, what would you want to see on it?

I don’t read my local newspaper nearly as often as I should.  I think there are two reasons for that.  First, small newspapers don’t publish daily which means that by the time it gets to my front porch, it’s out of date or it’s all feature stories–very little local news.  Second, the big dailies don’t have the bandwidth to focus on what’s happening in and around town at the neighborhood level. They’re forced to focus on broader regions which means the local news isn’t really all that local.

But I do read Chris O’Brien’s column in the San Jose Mercury News.  Chris is the lead business writer and a past recipient of a Knight News Foundation Grant to work on the Newsroom of the Future.  The Knight Foundation focuses on ways of getting information to underserved communities.  We think small neighborhoods fall into that category.

Chris’s article today highlighted the work of the Knight Commission on the Information Needs of Communities in a Democracy.  The commission was assembled to “recommend both public and private measures that would help American communities better meet their information needs.” Chris cites as a major challenge how people know who to trust?

“For a long time, newspapers and other news outlets served as a filter for much of this information. Publications developed track records and reputations on which people could judge them. Evaluating and deciding which outlets to trust was reasonable given the relatively small number of choices.

But with nearly infinite information streaming at us, deciding whom to trust becomes an overwhelming task.”

But I think there’s a larger issue and that is how do regular people, not just reporters and newspapers, discover this “nearly infinite information.”  And when they do, how do they sort through it to find what’s relevant to them?

These two issues are closely related.  Think about everything you know about what’s going on in your neighborhood.  Do you know everythign?  Probably not.  Do you know the exact same things as your friends and neighbors?  Probably not.  But amongst all of you, there’s a lot of information that you all know.

Now think about who you trust.  Most likely, you trust your good friends, your family, and your neighbors who you’ve lived next door to for a few years.

So imagine that there was a way for everyone in the neighborhood to contribute the information that they knew and a way for your friends and neighbors, who you know and trust, to help you sort through it to find what’s most relevant for you.  All of a sudden, you’ve got your community doing the job that was previously done by a newsroom and you personally know the sources of the information, which makes it trustworthy.

This is the vision that we have at Neighborsville:  Communities working together to share and discover the things that are most important to a neighborhood.  We believe that when neighbors share their knowledge with each other–on local events, local news, the best places to shop and eat, and which local businesses are best for your particular needs–and help each other know what’s most relevant for them, we can create smarter, better informed neighbors.

And that creates stronger neighborhoods.

Labor Day Weekend is always a big holiday at our house because it also happens to be my wife’s birthday.  Our family tradition is to have family, friends and neighbors over for a free-for-all BBQ in our backyard.  This year, we’ve got about 20 people coming over.

To keep costs down, we have everyone bring their own food and drinks plus a dish to share.  We fire up the grill and let everyone cook their own meat while the kids play in the backyard and ride bikes.  Having everyone share in the meat and drink buying and side dish preparing is a great way to keep costs and stress levels low while still being able to entertain a bunch of neighbors this holiday weekend.

What are you doing for Labor Day?  Share your tips for fun backyard BBQs!