I think you’re heading in the right direction; personalisation meets localisation and you get EveryBlock with a cherry on top…

http://outwithabang.rickwaghorn.co.uk/?p=93

Which is why we’re busily concentrating our thoughts on http://www.mylocalwriter.com over here..

All the best, etc

Everyblock is a brilliant solution, but only a piece of the puzzle. Hyperlocal will make sense and gain traction for publishers only when they include the kind of interactivity that Derek mentions.

It’s disheartening, but logical, that so many of the most vibrant discussions mentioned here are happening via Usenet/listserv. By their very nature, those channels are self-selecting and exclusive to the technorati.

The MSM need to integrate focused, personal conversation as a core function…data alone isn’t enough, and the social web has outmoded one-way communication.

Ironically, the biggest challenge for the big player may be outreach: We need to create an environment and adopt tools that support local communities — then go F2F to make the case that they matter to us. That’s unfamiliar territory for most newspapers and journos.

The reason grassroots hyperlocal solutions have arisen is that newspapers historically have approached neighborhoods with the same attitude they’ve had toward foreign coverage: Hit the high notes, gloss over the details and assume the audience will be grateful that you’re there at all.

The community is smarter than that. In a hyperlocal world, newspapers must engage neighborhoods, block by block, take the mission seriously and keep up their end of the conversation.

Conversely, a friend of mine started a discussion list for the SoBo area where I live and I read it every day. In an effort to attract members, she posted a note about it on a Daily Camera list and also on the Rocky Mountain Internet Users’ Group list. Bottom line, she got WAY more subscribers from the RMIUG list than the Camera.

In other words, she connected to people via where they are today, not where the papers like to think they are. It would’ve been trivial for someone at the Camera to do the same thing and likely with similar results… but they didn’t.

To succeed at this, newspapers need to hire not just journalists and circulation managers, but people who “get” where the community lives online and are naturally attuned to the best ways to find them.

BTW my friend is a prolific writer in her forties who’s a columnist for BusinessWeek online. It doesn’t have to be a twenty-somethings who spend all their time on Facebook.

That email list, BTW, is way more conducive to discussing things like adverse possession than comments on newspaper articles.

I agree that EveryBlock does not provide a “full diet,” and I’d challenge you to provide an example of a Web site that *does*. We do one thing and do it pretty well; other sites do other things and do them well. The need to provide a “full diet” of all information a person would ever want is a flawed idea. Go to Google for search, go to Amazon to buy things, go to EveryBlock for information about what’s happened around your address recently, go to the Chicago Sun-Times for information about what’s happened more generally in the city recently.

I agree with you, though, with your assessment of the transient.

Robb Montgomery: As a person who grew up in Naperville and now lives in Chicago, I sympathize with your jealousy of the city!

No, just joshin’. Bit of a joke there.

But, really, put yourself in our shoes: with limited resources, we simply get more bang for our buck by covering Philadelphia instead of Naperville, given it takes the same general amount of work.

Greetings from Naperville, The second largest city in Illinois and not part of Adrian’s Everyblock database. We are located right next to Aurora, the third largest city in the state. A 30 minute train ride into Chicago’s Union station . . .

EveryBlock has just expanded to Charlotte and Philly but if the model they have developed ignores the suburbs (You know where the majority of the population of the Greater Chicago Area lives and sleeps) then this model under serves and under delivers on the hyper-local potential largely because it ignores the data and social structures that exist in the real world. that is, the real world network of city and suburbs. How much richer it could be if Everyblock indeed covered every block.

That’s a pretty large missing link of data to fill in. And it must be a lot harder for Adrian to deliver than picking the low hanging fruit of data that serves only a big city core.

“TBall” by the way is known to us in the Visual Editors community as Tim Ball. Tim has worked as a San Jose Mercury News visual editor and some other newsrooms in the midwest and Asia in his career.

He lists his dudernet blog in his VizEds profile

http://visualeditors.ning.com/profile/TimBall

Hyperlocal information is utterly personal—it’s impossible to judge the quality or importance of it if you don’t live in and have an attachment to the community. But more importantly, the answer to the hyperlocal question is “all of the above”: professional content, user-generated content, forums, social tools, data, maps, photos, videos, business listings, reviews, “scraped” existing content, blogs, ads from local businesses, etc. Put it all together, with a strong business plan and marketing, and you’ve got something. But don’t dismiss it because some transient resident can’t get excited about anything more than where to walk his dog.