Hyperlocal Post-Mortem: Lessons Learned From InJersey. Fantastic pragmatic takeaways from Ted Mann. Highlights: local advertisers don’t like self-serve, build your site cheaply, and make it ridiculously easy for contributors to publish (e.g. don’t have them email posts to editors, and then require the editor to copy/paste, edit, and then publish).
How hyperlocal has a future. Dave Winer’s advice for publishers: “be sure you control your own publishing and distribution.” NYU has a hyperlocal conclave this Saturday with a tools discussion that’s sure to be fun.
The Oregonian to play nice with local bloggers and independent news site. Project to watch.
Every so often, I have one of those runs where I listen to a super inspirational podcast and come back with more ideas than I have the time to write them down. Tonight was one of those nights.
Dave Winer and Jay Rosen in the 12th edition of Rebooting the News explore a concept Dave refers to as a “coral reef” for local information. The importance of a coral reef in the sea is that it is a habitat for many other species to prosper. His argument for starting In Berkeley, what he thinks is the first local blog for Berkley, is that it might provide a coral reef for a lot of tremendous local data to grow from. Given the right formats for information storage, it can become a repository for community knowledge that everyone within the community can both contribute to and benefit from. What got me thinking, though, was what these formats might be.
