Comments on: HyperLocal Efforts Keep Going; OurTown Launches

By: Dena In Nampa

Dena In Nampa — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 21:09:54 +0000

To the nay sayers, there are local Our Town editors who are infusing their sites with hands on accounting of what is going on in their town. Most of the previous bad comments on Our Town above were made while the site was in beta testing. They continue to make improvements and have made this site very easy to use. I have only owned my site for four months and while there are local RSS feeds infused into it, it is also full of local articles. My site is a one stop shop. You can get local, state and national news, and leave a photo of what happened down the street at the same time. http://www.nampaid.ourtown. Everything is hard work, but hard work will pay off.

By: Shields Bialasik

Shields Bialasik — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 21:56:28 +0000

Our Town is essentially a bunch of RSS widgets pulling in RSS news feeds. Look it up on widgetbox.com

I wouldn’t call this hyperlocal. I would call this automated feeds.

The trick to hyperlocal is taking a community and giving it a real voice. We have successfully done this with our model

http://www.LocalsGuide.com

In which we have created a hyperlocal portal which produces a monthly web 2 print publication.

We mix a social network engine with media creation… creating a hyperlocal media machine.

Hyperlocal is gonna take the voice of people.

By: Ken Doctor

Ken Doctor — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 05:51:19 +0000

Peter: Good rundown of would-be city sites. Add to the mix MinnPost, CrossCut, Voice of San Diego and New Haven Independent. All kinds of flavors out there. I’m finding a curious mix of largely non-profit sites on the one hand and those seeking the riches of the local market on the other, with precious little cross-fertilization at this early stage.

For sites that do see their work as local journalism, there is some ad money to support them, but not much to support a significant professional staff — yet. So we’re seeing NPR-like memberships and angel funding to fill that gap, as these sites seek to establish themselves.

My bet: Only the best will survive, and they’ll be networked, sooner or later.

By: Justin

Justin — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 20:05:45 +0000

I’m an avid supporter of the hyperlocal movement (I should be, I’m involved in a startup myself!) and hope these sites take off. What we are doing is similar to smalltown.com’s website, which I think is an incredible start to what can be. I agree with the above, Ourtown indeed needs some work, hopefully they can improve and grow in tandem with everyone else.

By: links for 2008-04-13 « David Black

links for 2008-04-13 « David Black — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 02:38:05 +0000

[...] HyperLocal Efforts Keep Going; OurTown Launches – The Local Onliner “There are a number of new or re-energized hyperlocal efforts out there, trying to crack the code.” (tags: internet local hyperlocal citizenmedia participatory journalism ourtown) [...]

By: links for 2008-04-12

links for 2008-04-12 — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 16:36:45 +0000

[...] The Local Onliner » HyperLocal Efforts Keep Going; OurTown Launches There are a number of new or re-energized hyperlocal efforts out there, trying to crack the code. New efforts are expected shortly from Outside.in and SmallTown. (tags: local) [...]

By: Steve

Steve — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 11:53:42 +0000

I tried to access their site and received an error:

Session Ver 3.0 – DB_Open -Cannot open database “Sessions” requested by the login. The login failed.(Microsoft SQL Native Client) error ’800a03e9′

Session Ver 3.0 – DB_Open -Cannot open database “Sessions” requested by the login. The login failed.(Microsoft SQL Native Client)

/inc\authentication.inc, line 158

By: Mike

Mike — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 00:43:59 +0000

I want hyperlocal, community-fueled news sites to work as much as anyone else, but this is a joke. The site is a mess, the aggregation and matching is terrible, and there’s just no way this will ever take off.

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 19:25:41 +0000

OurTown’s design is terrible. Completely unusable layout for the city view.

Looks like design is harder than franchising, ad sales, content, and audience building