Recent Articles
How President Obama’s Stimulus Plan can Help the HyperLocal Internet
Jan 27, 2009 Businesses, Live Local 1 Comment
President Obama presented an $825 billion economic stimulus plan this month, $6 billion of which is proposed to expand high-speed Internet access in rural and undeserved communities. The theory is that spreading Internet access to underprivileged communities will help build jobs and increase innovation and efficiency in the US.
This is very exciting for those of us involved in HyperLocal content as it will only make the possibilities for localizing the Internet even stronger. Areas still using dial-up modems to connect to the Internet will have access to broadband connections. We will begin to see more people from these small areas joining social networks, starting blogs and connecting more openly with others online.
Build Your Company’s Community Online – Gary Vaynerchuk
Jan 26, 2009 Businesses, Community, Video 1 Comment
Gary Vaynerchuk is an entrepreneur who has mastered the art of building a personal brand. He operates two websites (Wine Library TV, and GaryVaynerchuk.com) and gives many speeches on building a brand and running a successful business. In this talk (video below) Gary discusses how small businesses should build their community of users/clients and why it is important for any business, big or small, to be passionate about doing this. Here are a few key points he touches on:
- Have a face behind your company
- Join any community that can reach even a single person
- Show that you care about your users and clients
- Have patience, the social-media sphere is just beginning
- Become a part of your community
When you watch this we hope you will think about the ways TownSync can connect your business to the local community as well as build your brand online.
How local will a TownSync Community be?
Jan 23, 2009 Live Local, TownSync 1 Comment
A very interesting site by Ben Fry called “ZipDecoder” breaks the United States down by zip-codes visually. This sparked our interest as we thought it would give our users a better idea of just how local a TownSync Community can be. We suggest you check out the site, and keep in mind that TownSync will have a Community for every one of these zip-codes!
The Web’s Future is “Town”
Jan 16, 2009 Live Local, TownSync Leave a comment
We recently read an interesting article written in the BBC called “The web’s future is ‘village.” The article goes into detail, and interviews a man from HP named Bernardo Huberman, about how people are connected to thousands of people online but they really only pay attention to a few of them, “… enough people to fill a village.”
In our case, however, it’s a town. The concept of TownSync was based on the idea that people currently aren’t connecting with others online that are close enough to affect them in the real world. Hyperlocal networking is a way to connect people that matter to you. What’s going on in your area? Who’s new to town? What’s the best place to play pool nearby? These are questions we hope TownSync will help answer for those connecting on the site.
Here are few quotes from the article, and here’s the link, enjoy!
Despite the desire to have the world of information at our fingertips and a social networking page that boasts of hundreds of so-called “friends”, the reality is very different.
Researchers at Hewlett Packard have found that, in truth, we really only bother about a handful of friends and generally visit a small number of websites.
“With Facebook many people boast of having 100, 200 friends but in reality only keep up or track a very few of them.”
On this basis Mr Huberman concludes that we are returning to a time where we maintain close contact with a small number of people – enough people to fill a village.
“Things are starting to become intimate again,” he said. “We went through this explosion, this illusion that the world is at my fingertips and I can reach anyone and everybody. But at the end of the day we notice that we actually interact with very few.”
The Web vs. Printed News: How can Newspapers keep up?
Jan 14, 2009 Newspapers, TownSync 2 Comments
A recent article in Seth Godin’s Blog discusses the dying realm of newspapers and inspired us to pass it on to our readers.
Newspapers are quickly losing steam along with the rest of the economy. The growing popularity of blog journalism and the birth of localized websites and search engines are further eroding newspaper revenue. Now anyone can become a journalist for their area, and people are beginning to put down the paper and pick up the computer or mobile phone. Godin discusses what people would miss if the newspapers were gone. He argues the sports, weather and reviews sections, the ads, inserts and coupons, and the editorials and op eds, will not be missed by many as their counterparts online are just as good if not better. “What’s left,” he says, is “local news, investigative journalism and intelligent coverage of national news.”
His issue is that when all local news comes from the blogosphere and there is a lack of what he calls “intelligent coverage” the government can do whatever it wants. He worries “about the quality of legislation when there isn’t a passionate, unbiased reporter there to explain it to us.”
He makes the argument that if it really is the valuable duty of the newspaper to have this unbiased reporting then we will find a way to pay for it in some way. “Newspapers took two cents of journalism and wrapped in ninety-eight cents of overhead and distraction.” His main argument is that the newspaper will be boiled down to their essential parts and those parts will be the only thing that can coexist with the blog/social-media world.
“The magic of the web, the reason you should care about this even if you don’t care about the news, is that when the marginal cost of something is free and when the time to deliver it is zero, the economics become magical. It’s like 6 divided by zero. Infinity.”
We do not consider TownSync to be a competitor with Newspapers, or even local journalists. We consider TownSync to be a place to learn more about your local town, meet people, visit business pages, discuss topics, and find new information sources – be it newspaper, blog journalism or what have you.
However, we are still selling ad space and attempting to capitalize on the local market, the same market that newspapers have been supplying and profiting from for decades. If anything else, we believe in supporting local businesses and the local economy, and with the current economic turmoil and the shift toward online consumption and news, print newspapers are struggling mightily. We have been working hard to develop our franchise program for newspapers, allowing them to purchase zip-codes in exchange for a % of revenue in their town. The hope is that our program will help papers expand their revenue base while providing us a media outlet in local markets we cannot reach otherwise.
You can read Seth Godin’s full post here.
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