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?

UPDATE: John Battelle has a great post up on OPEN Forum about Small Business Blogging using his local hardware store as a case study.  If this is a topic of interest to you, his post is a must read.

A few days ago, I stumbled across hyperlocalblogger.com, a blog about hyperlocal blogging (very meta, I know).  It’s written by Matt McGee who is using hyperlocal blogging to help his wife’s real estate business.  Matt has been writing a series called How To Start A Hyperlocal Blog.  His series is targeted primarily at local businesses who are looking for ways to create deeper connections with thier customers and find new business.

I’m a huge fan of hyperlocal blogs.  I think that they are a great way for neighbors to share information about their neighborhoods with each other.  At Neighborsville, one of the centerpieces of our platform will be the Neighborhood Blogs.  This is a chance for neighbors to share their thoughts about their neighborhood with each other and discuss the issues they find as most important.

But Matt brings up a different point and that is blogging for small businesses.  Every small business owner has a specialty whether it’s books, real estate, plumbing or whatever that most of their customers have little or no experience with.  There’s tremendous value for a business to establish themselves as an expert in their field for people who are looking for information.  Yet for some reason, very few business owners blog.  This is a function of two things.  First, it takes time…and that’s something that small business owners have very little of.  Second, blogging is not one of the things that they are experts in.

We think it’s critical for small business owners to have an outlet to share their expertise with their customer base.  At Neighborsville, small businesses will have the opportunity to blog along side their neighbors about what they know best without having to setup or maintain their own blog and they’ll be able to do it in a forum that’s readily accessible to the people in the neighborhoods they serve.

Part of our mission is to give small business owners the tools that they need to create deeper connections with their audiences.  We’re designing simple tools that will allow small business owners to easily create new content that their neighbors want to see–not banner ads or search ads.  Imagine a local restaurant sharing some of their favorite recipes or a landscaper talking about what the best kinds of shade trees are as summer approaches.  Sharing these key insights is critical for businesses to create stronger relationships with their customers and expand their reach to new customers as well.

If you’re a small business owner, I encourage you to read Matt’s series and see how blogging might be able to help you reach your business goals.

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.