Andanh.com

1. Blogging to death
   Blogosphere on fire over NY Times story
2. Web of Pulitzers
   Prize-winners using web more than ever
3. Behavioral ad-versity
   59 percent don’t like ads based on online activity
4. Flickr video
   Photo site adds video; some don’t like it
5. PostaCrime
   Anyone can post videos of possible criminals

Silicon Valley journalist/blogger Tom Foremski had had enough. Two years ago, he wrote a poison pen letter to the PR industry in a blog post titled Die! Press release! Die! Die! Die!, in which he exhorted publicists to break down press releases into sections, tag the information and provide links to more sources.

“Press releases are nearly useless,” he wrote. “They typically start with a tremendous amount of top-spin, they contain pat-on-the-back phrases and meaningless quotes…Press releases are created by committees, edited by lawyers, and then sent out at great expense through Business Wire or PRnewswire to reach the digital and physical trash bins of tens of thousands of journalists. This madness has to end. It is wasted time and effort by hundreds of thousands of professionals.”

Much to Foremski’s great surprise, PR pros actually listened. A few months later, Todd Defren at SHIFT Commmunications released the Social Media Press Release (click the image at left to see it). That soon crossed the pond, where UK publicists at Webitpr created their own riff called the Social Media News Release (SMNR). In both cases, the press releases were more than just long-form text. Instead they feature:

> Contact information prominently displayed up top.
> A list of basic facts.
> A series of quotes.
> Company logos and photo headshots.
> Related audio or video.
> Social bookmarking or sharing links to sites such as Digg and del.icio.us.
> RSS feeds.
> Comments.

As press releases start to include more social-media elements, they are also popping up in search results and news aggregators such as Google News and Techmeme, letting companies take their messages directly to consumers, investors and anyone else interested in their products. That means the people who craft press releases must think about new audiences and ways they can turn up higher in search results by using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques.

Despite all the talk about SMNRs, they still have a long way to go for mainstream acceptance in the PR industry. Foremski told me he was glad that PR folks were paying attention and trying to make changes, but that he hadn’t seen too many of these new-fangled SMNRs.

“All I wanted was to put some links in it and some tags,” he said. “When I wrote the piece I was amazed at the storm it created. I was just saying to take the media technology that we have and apply it to this type of information. And they’re still arguing about it. I don’t know what the problem is, because if you do break it up, you can have both: your traditional release and other formats. Has it made much of a difference? Not yet. I see one or two of them occasionally.”

Going Around Gatekeepers?

Foremski is especially worried that press releases now rank highly on search engine results or in aggregators such as Google News, and hopes that readers don’t confuse company releases with real news stories.

One of the sparks for this story was a recent email I received from a publicist for Business Wire, a wire service for press releases, who noted the newfound power of company press releases:

Business Wire has morphed into what can be called a high-speed ‘search engine news delivery service’ with newfound capabilities to aggressively shoot to the top of search engines, news sites and social media with clientele’s materials. When press releases can be coded and stuffed with multimedia to the point that they receive more traffic and linkage than the same news stories which add the nuance and interpretation, who is doing an end run around whom?

The example Business Wire gives was the recent story of AOL buying Bebo, with the Business Wire story taking top billing on the Techmeme aggregation of stories on the subject. Laura Sturaitis, senior vice president of media services & product strategy for Business Wire, told me she was spending a lot of time educating clients on new ways of optimizing press releases for search engines.

“We’re writing for reporters and writing for robots, and our clients really have to do both,” she said. “We’re in a three-year process of teaching our clients that at the time they start a press release [to consider] what they can do that’s great for a reporter, to pitch the story, but also recognize that the release is crossing out onto the Internet onto aggregators… If we have a logo or image or photograph, that shows up as a thumbnail on Google News. And we found that two and a half times more people will click on it if there’s an image than if not. People scan it and are drawn to photos.”

While Google News does include Business Wire and other PR release wires as sources, the aggregator does not highlight press releases as much as news stories, according to Josh Cohen, business product manager of Google News. Cohen told me there are a number of myths that publishers believe will help their ranking on Google News (which were debunked on the Google News blog last week).

“We won’t crawl press releases directly from a company’s website,” he said. “We crawl from the PR distributors…And we label them as press releases for our users. We treat them differently within our results, so that press releases won’t lead a cluster, they won’t be on a home page or on section pages, but if you do a search on a given story, it will show up in results.”

Cohen said that photos on Google News can help draw clicks but it depends on the photo and the particular story. For instance, a photo of Ben Bernanke testifying before Congress might not get the clicks that a photo of a volcano erupting would get.

Gabe Rivera, who runs Techmeme, isn’t worried that people will confuse a Business Wire press release with a more analytical story from a blogger or journalist — though “editorial stories” sometimes simply parrot press releases. Rivera said that his algorithm for Techmeme doesn’t treat press releases any different than other sources, though he said that might change in the future. Rivera noted that official company blogs are another way that publicists can get their messages out to other bloggers.

“Company blogs in many ways function like press releases, and play a role similar to press releases on Techmeme,” he told me via email. “I don’t expect too many company blogs to become influential sources, but the better ones tend to receive a fair amount of attention when news breaks.”

On a recent Techmeme Leaderboard list, which tracks the most frequently cited sources on Techmeme, the Official Google Blog came in at #30, Microsoft’s press site was #33, and Business Wire was #56. The reality is that if a company’s press release or blog has breaking news, that’s where journalists and bloggers will link at the outset. But that doesn’t mean that journalists don’t have a place in the ecosystem of sources.

“I don’t see press releases ever being able compete on the same playing field as news sources and blogs on trust among educated readers because people will be able to see them as what they are — often static distributions from corporations,” said Steve Rubel, PR blogger and senior vice president, director of insights at Edelman Digital. “However, they can have a big influence through search results. In addition, they are increasingly becoming recognized as the starting point of the news cycle — something they always have been, but there’s more transparency in the entire PR process. Press releases will decline over time, I believe, in favor of other corporate sponsored media.”

What Works and What Doesn’t

The social media news release looks impressive and tech-savvy (check out this one about a Second Life project), but does it work? Ben Ayers, a senior publicist for ITV in the UK, has been using Webitpr’s SMNR and said he’s had mixed results so far.

“Anecdotally, there are mixed views from journalists, ranging from ‘Ooh aren’t you high tech’ to ‘I prefer a good old press release,’” Ayers said via email. “Overall, the response has been fairly muted. The release has definitely resulted in more online coverage, which was the aim. It has also given us a certain amount of kudos internally and externally for embracing new ways of distributing information, which again is a good thing.”

Ayers said one problem was that publicists and journalists are not using social media tools enough for the nouveau press releases to make a big difference. He would also like to see more customizable SMNRs, so he can pick specific social media functionality depending on the client.

Stephen Davies, who writes PRBlogger.com and is social media manager for Webitpr, said that one triumph for the SMNR is trackability. You can easily find out how well you’re doing with all the bookmarking, links, and multimedia you add to your release.

“We’ve been pleasantly surprised at how open-minded companies have been about the comment facility as we initially thought there would be a reluctance to venture into the unknown,” Davies said. “Obviously this is new to them and allowing anyone the ability to comment on their news material might seem quite daunting. So far we’ve only distributed one SMNR without comments so I’m very optimistic about creating two-way dialogue through news releases.”

Edelman PR, which has pushed SMNRs through its StoryCrafter press release engine, shows what can go wrong with comments on press releases. The top SMNR on its site, about a recently hired senior vice president, includes two comments — both of which are spam.

Andy Beal, a marketing consultant who writes the Marketing Pilgrim blog and co-wrote the book, “Radically Transparent” (with Dr. Judy Strauss), says that SMNRs are hit-and-miss so far.

“Things that have gone over well are simple things like having the contact information more prominent — or linking to the media room or the headshot of the individual, or stock images for a product launch,” Beal said. “But some things go too far. Embedding podcasts or video is not necessarily a must-have at this stage. The same with ‘Digg this’ buttons. If you have something that’s worthy of the front page of Digg it’s very unlikely you’ll be putting it out in the format of a press release. Some of the social media items are a bit optimistic.”

Perhaps at this early stage — just two years into the life of the SMNR vs. 100 years of the text press release — we can only expect small victories for the evolution of the format: a link here, a photo there, a little less spin. More importantly, the mindset of publicists and companies is starting to change as they realize that they are losing control of their tightly scripted message.

“A lot of companies have this delusion that they are still in control of the message,” Beal said. “But their customers have been influencing their reputation, and companies are starting to wake up to the fact that these conversations are happening online. The conversations will happen whether they participate or not, so the companies will realize that they’re better off finding their role in the conversation and joining in.”

Rubel believes that press releases will eventually be surpassed by company blogs, and by smart marketers who can become “digital curators” for their area of expertise.

“The Internet allows every company to become a media company,” he said. “It takes resources, dedication and a nose for creating good content that people want. Brands will become digital curators in high interest niches. This will either be a solo effort, or more likely, in partnership with bloggers, media companies and/or everyday consumers.”

More Resources

If you want to read more about the history and evolution of the press release, follow these links:

A Press Release for Social Media? I Think Not. at Blog Business Summit

Battle Royale about the Social Media Release at PRSquared

IABC assumes Social Media Release leadership role from IABC

Is the Social Media Press Release a Meatball Sundae? at Search Engine Watch

Press Releases Get ‘Social.’ Um, no. by Dan Blank

Social Media Releases — A Report from the Field by Brian Solis

The Definitive Guide to Social Media Releases at PR 2.0

The History, Evolution and Future of the Press Release at Tech PR Gems

The 100th Birthday of the Press Release at Search Engine Watch

What do you think about the evolution of press releases? Do you think they should be treated as equal sources in news aggregators? If you’re in PR, do you use the SMNR and have they been successful? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Photos of Tom Foremski and Gabe Rivera by Scott Beale via Flickr.

UPDATE: There’s been a lot of great discussions out in the blogosphere sparked by this story. Folks are making an important point: Social news releases are only as good as the product or service or story you tell. A new format will not help out a flawed product.

Duncan Riley says SMNRs themselves are flawed because they don’t have enough of a hook for journalists. Mathew Ingram believes the most important part of the press release isn’t “social media” buzzwords, but links. That’s also been the concern of Foremski as well, who demanded more links in press releases.

I also heard from Maggie Fox, CEO of Social Media Group, who have been creating custom SMPRs for all Ford Motor Company releases. These definitely take the concept a step further, as the SMPRs are updated almost like a blog, with updates, photos, videos, etc. and even a blogroll at the bottom. I asked Fox what worked and what didn’t with their SMPRs. Here’s what she told me via email:

Hundreds of bloggers and [mainstream media] outlets have picked up images, video and stories from the Ford SMPRs. The fact that the SMPRs are RSS-enabled also means that they are automatically notified of updates to topics they find of interest. We can measure the number of people who have accessed our content on these platforms. What kind of content gets viewed/shared most often? This informs future content strategies (it’s like an ongoing, never ending focus group).

Stuff that hasn’t worked so well: SMPRs that support static stories. The whole idea is to create a platform that allows the story to evolve over time; when the story is dead after the SMPR is published, understandably the spread and reach of the content (and the story itself) dies rather quickly. Our platform is ideally suited to stories that evolve over time, and the individual SMPRs are updated modularly. You still have to do traditional outreach to let people know that the content is there, working it into your more traditional materials.

Seems like nearly every day I get a notice in my in-box about a new conference, a new initiative, a new working group that will be looking at ways that traditional media can change with the digital times. For the most part, these programs have thoughtful people who sincerely want to help news organizations change.

My worry is that they might be falling into the trap of “all talk, no action” (ATNA). I used to sit around with friends and colleagues and brainstorm for new dot-com startups or business ideas, yet they never made it out of the talking stage. We called them “ATNA Productions.” They can be fun or clever, but there’s never an intention to actually do them.

(One of those ideas, “Catferatu,” an update of the vampire movie “Nosferatu” with a cat in the lead role, at least now has a trailer online.)

On the flipside, I’m heartened when I hear about newsrooms taking concrete steps to change. That might be launching new blogs or new podcasts, or having reporters take photographs or video while on print assignments. Or when broadcast outlets pay more attention to their websites, archiving video and setting up ways for viewers to contribute.

So I’ve decided to contrast some of the places where talk is happening, alongside some of the people who are walking that talk. This is not meant to be a slam against the talk, because it’s important for us to talk about ideas, network and find solutions to common problems. I hope that more people who are gathering to talk will think about the important “next steps”: taking action.

Talk: NewsTools2008 conference at Yahoo, a “mashup of journalists, technologists and entrepreneurs” from April 30 to May 3. (I’m planning on being there to cover it for MediaShift.)

Action: EveryBlock, a startup from journalist-techie Adrian Holovaty that mashes up local databases — from crime to photos to Craigslist ads — and maps them according to street or ZIP code.

Talk: World Editors Forum in Sweden from June 1 to 4, including a panel about whether Web 2.0 will birth a new form of collaborative journalism.

Action: BeatBlogging.org, in which 13 news organizations are having reporters create social networks or email lists for their sources, readers and experts in their field to help them report collaboratively.

Talk: Ad:Tech show in San Francisco from April 15 to 17, looking at innovative ways that online marketers are reaching audiences.

Action: PopURLs Blue Edition, in which the PopURLs site created a special edition of the news aggregator focused on information technology and sponsored by Intel.

Talk: Symposium on Investigative Reporting at the University of California-Berkeley on April 26 to 27, through the school’s Investigative Reporting Program. There will be panels such as “Is There a Future for Investigative Journalism?” “Investigative Reporting on the Web?” and “Are Non-Profits the Answer?” (I plan to attend the event to find out if they have any answers to these questions and to blog about it for MediaShift.)

Action: The Center for Public Integrity has been producing amazing investigative work as an online non-profit since 1990, including the Buying of the President series that looks into the influence of money in politics.

Talk: New Media Expo in Las Vegas from August 14 to 16, with hands-on tutorials for creating audio podcasts and video reports.

Action: Mogulus, a startup site that combines live video shows and chat rooms, not to mention the “Grid” on the home page with 26 live feeds.

Talk: NAB show in Las Vegas from April 11 to 17, a massive gathering for TV broadcasters, the “ultimate destination for media professionals powering the future,” according to the pop-up NAB chief (visit the site and you’ll see how he pops up on the screen).

Action: LiveNewsCameras, a site started by the local Fox TV affiliate in Chicago that shows you satellite feeds from around the country and the world — along with a site “moderator” on camera and a Twitter feed.

What other conferences or panel discussions did I miss for events coming up? What other efforts have you seen of newsrooms walking their talk? Share your thoughts in the comments below and I’ll add them to the list above, with credit to you.

Everyone’s a producer — or so it seems with the availability of video-making tools for just about anyone these days. With the arrival of cheaper, more compact equipment and the rapid of advance of technology in this area, it’s possible to shoot a pretty good quality video with a small digital camera or even a high-end cell phone.

Plus, some producers have gone a step further. Instead of creating one-off videos and uploading them to YouTube, they’ve taken on the more ambitious task of creating entire series of shows made specifically for viewing on the web. The phenomenon began in the mid-1990s, with one of the first web serials, The Spot, which allowed viewers to interact with the characters and intervene in the storyline. The Spot developed an ardent following, but later crashed and burned.

More recently, lonelygirl15 took off, a YouTube sensation which led viewers to believe they were watching the videoblog of a teenage girl, when in reality the whole thing was a way for the filmmakers to land a movie deal. Commercial success has mostly evaded these series when trying to make a jump like that, as was the case with Quarterlife, a web serial that debuted on NBC in February of this year but was cancelled after just one episode.

Like regular television shows, there is a wide variety of genres in the web series world, from cooking shows to soap operas to sci-fi adventures. Some have laughable production values while others rival the quality of what’s on traditional TV. But the most unique thing about these series is that they allow for creativity and niche content that isn’t commonly found on regular television. Much of the content and subject matter might be deemed too special interest or not commercial-friendly enough for television — but on the Internet, anything goes.

I checked out a whole slew of the latest Internet serials, and here is a selection of the ones that make good use of the “other small screen.”

The Guild
Recent winner of a YouTube award for Best Web Series, The Guild is a sitcom about the lives of a group of young gamers who spend all of their time engaged in online gaming worlds and their relationships with one another. Even though The Guild’s creators describe it as “written for gamers, about gamers by a gamer,” I could still enjoy it as a non-gamer.

I know nothing about the jargon or the quirks of the gaming world, but the humor is accessible and pokes fun at the players’ obsession with games and how they struggle with more human interaction. This series stands out because it goes beyond the typical characters seen on television to be more inclusive of lifestyles that aren’t normally represented on TV.

Drawn by Pain
Filmmaker Jesse Cowell describes his web series as a “dramatic action packed 12-part series in a sea of comedic web content.” Indeed, most of what you online are works of comedy, and Drawn by Pain is the rare exception. Mostly real action but partly animation, Drawn by Pain has an engaging and moving storyline, solid acting in most cases and quality production values. While the fantastical storyline and the combination of live action and animation might not fly on television, the web provides a perfect platform for taking the kinds of risks this director has taken.

Afterworld
Some web series don’t involve acting; at least not by real live actors. This science fiction series relies on computer animation to tell the story of Russell Shoemaker, a businessman from Seattle on a business trip who wakes up in a Manhattan hotel one morning to find that the living world around him seems to have disappeared, victim of a mysterious disaster scenario called “The Fall.”

The narration by the character Russell, who tells the story in first person, is well acted. Even though it’s animated characters you’re watching, the storyline is quite evocative. Afterworld takes its web platform a step further by adding extra interactive experiences to enhance viewing, like Russell’s travel journal, which you can flip through like the pages of real book. I’m not a huge sci-fi fan but this series easily loops you in. Plus, the brevity of the episodes ensures that you won’t get bored, which is important with attention-deficient web viewers.

My Damn Channel
This isn’t a show but a web series “network” with various thematic channels, mostly focused on comedy content. The shows are hilarious and probably way too edgy for regular TV (though you never know these days). The web is the perfect place for spreading the kinds of memes that get started by the humor of shows like fake soap “Horrible People” and the spoof instructional series “You Suck at Photoshop.” The great thing about My Damn Channel that even though you’re watching 5-minute clips on your computer, it feels like you are watching your favorite comedy network on TV.

Chad Vader: Day Shift Manager
Also in the comedy category, and somewhat inactive at present, is a favorite of mine called “Chad Vader,” which follows Darth Vader’s “younger, less charismatic brother” Chad in his day-to-day work as a shift manager at a grocery store. The central idea of this series is so geeky and ridiculous that the writers would be quickly booted out of the room of a pitch session in Hollywood. But on the web, silliness works, and plot lines that seem unthinkable are widely embraced when the ideas are well-executed like they are in this web series.

Making the Jump to TV?

While some of these series may not ever see mainstream success, their creators have done a good job finding the right platform for their shows online, where they’ve found good followings and received praise for their efforts. And there are some more commercial-driven web series that look promising, including the new thriller Blood Cell on 60frames.com (which, incidentally, stars the actress who played lonelygirl15).

Plus, there’s the comedy Knockers, which is produced by Generate, a company focused on making web series. The startup recently received $6 million in funding and has signed some “web stars” such as the creators of Chad Vader to create new shows. Social networks such as MySpace are also creating original web series such as Roommates to create more professional content for advertisers. Former Disney chief Michael Eisner has also been pushing web serials via MySpace.

With so much good content available in various web series, it’s easy to see the possibility of some of these shows making the jump to traditional TV after they get popular online. I actually hope that doesn’t happen, as the creative freedom and originality that is possible on the web — the ability to “dance like no one’s watching,” even though someone is — might be squelched by impositions from Hollywood producers and networks. While I’d love to see Chad Vader on primetime, I wouldn’t want him to lose his edge. That kind of weird humor is for the Internet, but not necessarily for the masses at home on the couch.

What do you think? Are web series the wave of the future in television or just a passing fad? Do you watch web series? Why or why not? Which web series are your favorites and why? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Jennifer Woodard Maderazo is the associate editor of PBS MediaShift. She is a San Francisco-based writer, blogger and marketer, who covers Latino marketing at Latin-Know and Latino cultural issues at VivirLatino.

We are a society that lives more and more in our technology-induced bubbles. When we go outside, we wear an iPod; we talk on cell phones while driving. In urban areas, we might never meet our neighbors unless there’s a fire or earthquake. But can technology also help bring us together in our physical communities, and help us get to know our neighbors?

Front Porch Forum (FPF) is making a valiant effort to do just that, offering up closed email forums that are strictly limited to people living within each physical neighborhood in Chittenden County, Vermont. Rather than being free-wheeling, anything-goes forums, FPF has been able to build more civil discussions by having people include their full name, street name and email address with each post. And users rave about how the site helps them connect with neighbors, find a lost pet or a good landlord, and even complain directly to local government officials.

But while the service has flourished, gaining more than 8,800 subscribers by word of mouth alone, Front Porch Forum has had trouble figuring out how to make the business profitable. Fifty local businesses have signed on as sponsors, and some municipal departments pay a monthly subscription fee of $99 to reach constituents, but FPF hasn’t been able to find the steady stream of revenue needed to expand into other Vermont counties and beyond.

Michael Wood-Lewis started FPF as a way to meet neighbors in Burlington, Vermont, after he had moved there from Washington, DC. He ran one neighborhood email list starting in 2000 as a hobby, and then decided to make it a full-time business about 18 months ago, expanding it into the entire county, with 130 forums. The idea was to give people a simple way to get to know their neighbors, a lost art in much of the country where the bake sales and lemonade stands of yore are uncommon occurences.

“The surprising thing was the degree to which people were using it,” Wood-Lewis told me. “And we kept an open source attitude toward the rules of engagement. We ceded ownership over to the neighborhood. Someone said, ‘You really should remove anonymous postings,’ so we required first names. After awhile, people said, ‘First names are fine, but I don’t know who Bill is.’ So bit by bit, we got to using first and last name, the street you live on and your email address on every post. And we had this clear vision of folks using this to get to know each other better. It’s not about news or classifieds or politics — all that happens, but it’s secondary to getting to know your neighbors.”

The people who use FPF can’t get enough of it. Vermont-based novelist and blogger Philip Baruth told me he was surprised no one had thought of something like Front Porch Forum before.

“It’s great,” he said. “It puts the power of the Internet at the extreme local level where you’re not used to using it. If you have a homespun blog, and you have readers in your city, you never get down to the level where you could target the people around you. It proves endlessly useful…I might walk my dog past a house but never know who lived there. But then I see that address on the forum and I start to fill in the blanks on who lives in all these houses.”

Local publicist Rachel Carter has been on three different forums on FPF, and told me that everything isn’t peaches and cream. “The forum has a lot of complaining, and people wanting to post political nonsense, and sometimes some fighting,” she said. “Some of the postings can be negative, but there’s positive in that people are discussing things. I think it’s a factor of the people that are here and the anger in the community and has nothing to do with the forum.”

Carter told me the ads from sponsors run at the bottom of the email roundups, and that they might work better if one sponsor was highlighted per email, with more relevant messages. “The best way to do advertising would be if it was more personalized,” she said. “One advertiser per day, who’s tied to the community, and was more personally targeted to that community. ‘We’re a store in this neighborhood, come in and get a special discount.’ That would go over big.”

Wood-Lewis is currently trying to win a funding contest from the Case Foundation (started by former AOL chief Steve Case and his wife Jean), which has already netted FPF $10,000 as a finalist. If FPF gets enough online votes, Wood-Lewis will get another $25,000, which he says is a lot of money for a bootstrapped startup company run by one person, himself. The following is an edited transcript of my recent phone chat with Wood-Lewis.

Tell me when you first started Front Porch Forum, and why you did it, and also why you decided to expand it into more towns.

Michael Wood-Lewis: Back in 2000, my wife and I had moved here to Burlington from Washington, DC, a couple years before, hoping to leave the big city to a place where we could fit in to a smaller city and find community. And we landed in a neighborhood that was known for being great that way, but we still hadn’t met the neighbors. My wife is a public school teacher and decided to take the bull by the horns. She baked cookies and took them over to [the neighbors], and used china plates instead of paper plates so that they would have a chance to bring them back and we could interact again. We never saw the plates again.

It wasn’t that they were bad folks, it’s that everyone is busy and cultural expectations have shifted in this generation. We were just strangers who lived next door. There’s no social contract there. Maybe if our house was on fire, it would have kicked in. Our second attempt was to build what was a precursor to a Yahoo Group for the neighborhood. And we used fairly primitive tools to build it, and made fliers and dropped them in 300 front doors. And in short order, 25, 50, 75 households signed up and people started using it. Now that kind of thing is old news, but at the time it was fairly unusual.

The evidence was overwhelming that we had something that was worth sharing. And at the same time I was leaving my job [in 2006], I thought I could try to make this work. I hired a web developer I knew to put together a website and just put it out there so people could sign up. And now, after a year and a half, we host 130 neighborhood forums across the metro area. So anyone in this area can put in their physical address and it will land in a pre-existing forum. And now we’re at 8,808 total subscribers in Chittenden County, and about 4,600 subscribers in the City of Burlington. Some neighborhoods are as high as 90% [participation].

How do you differentiate what you do from the simple Yahoo Groups or Google Groups that anyone can set up?

Wood-Lewis: In several ways. People sometimes miss what we’re doing from a distance. We’ve banished the term listserve or Yahoo Groups in comparing this, because people generally have a bad experience with them. My wife, for example, is on her computer every day and sometimes she gets into a Yahoo Group, and says, ‘I get too much junk, and someone just replied to a 10-page message and didn’t erase it when they replied, and why doesn’t someone put a headline on this?’ It’s a hard-to-use interface, and forget about customer service. It’s typically a frustrating experience for most people.

We designed our service to be as unobtrusive as possible. It arrives in your in-box because that’s where you find everyone. We’re trying to get just about everyone in the neighborhood and nearly everyone uses email. Plus, it’s moderated and restricted to only nearby neighbors and it’s not anonymous…There are people who can cut across multiple forums, and there’s interesting things that happen with that. Certain public officials can do that for their jurisdiction. So the representative for Ward 5 can get access into the nine forums that they represent. The same for school board members or police or other neighborhood officials.

The public officials take a lot away because they listen in and tune in quite a bit. My initial thought was that these guys would be inundated with lost-cat messages and their eyes would glaze over. But what I found was that most of the local public officials are very interested in reading these because it’s a way to have their ear to the ground with constituents. And they can post announcements about issues, about car break-ins or Wal-Mart plans, or whatever, to get feedback.

A lot of people talk about how the Internet can help public officials stay in touch with constituents. I guess you’re seeing that happening.

Wood-Lewis: Definitely. And it’s not all smooth sailing. There are challenges and occasionally the citizens are unreasonable and some officials don’t always do well with engagement. There’s a bit of a learning curve but eventually it’s a positive experience.

We also have Neighborhood Volunteers, and anyone can sign up to do that and be a booster. And by doing that, they have access to a forum of all the volunteers across the county. And there are now 250 to 300 volunteers. So for anyone who does community organizing, they can use this to reach other active organizers, who then have access to dozens of their neighbors. So if you’re trying to organize something, a charity drive, you can post it to the volunteer forum, and then reach thousands of people.

Do the volunteers moderate the forums? Have they blocked messages from going through?

Wood-Lewis: No. I don’t think we’ve ever forbidden a message. Front Porch Forum does have a moderator, and that’s me. We’re looking to make our first hire and have someone take off some of the load. We don’t run into too many issues with content because everyone’s clearly identified, and you’re talking with your neighbors and you have your street address on it. On the other hand, our local newspaper opened up comments on its articles and there’s been some nasty stuff on there.

Do you have any way to protect yourself from someone going on and posing as someone else?

Wood-Lewis: We have some basic precautionary measures. If someone posts something in a neighborhood of 300 households and says he’s Dan Smith, that’s going to be flushed out pretty quickly. I had one guy sign up like that and his automated welcome message went through, which triggered three people calling me saying there was no such address and they didn’t know the name. So I contacted him and never heard back. The only mischief we see is people want to get into the neighbordhood forums. We’re not trying to be jerks but what gives them their power is that it’s just their neighbors on each forum.

Every time we ask people about opening up the content — and there’s terrific content on there — the reaction we get is, ‘Yeah, I’d like to see those, but as far as posting, I would cut posting in half and not post on many subjects.’ Posting a letter to nearby neighbors is like talking at a block party. Posting something more broadly is more like a letter to the editor. Those are fundamentally two different things. I’m trying to keep that block party vibe, so we need to keep it segregated.

Tell me about the business model. You have some sponsorships and advertisements. Is that where you see your main revenues?

Wood-Lewis: We went for our first year without attempting to generate any revenue. We just wanted to get the technology going and see if there was a demand for the service first. For the last six months, we’ve been working to get some revenues, and it’s promising, but we’re not there yet. The primary source is advertising and getting sponsors. We’ve had 50 or so local businesses in our county come to us, and it’s just me. We don’t have any investment capital to date or sales staff. Businesses come to us asking if they can advertise, and we now can say, ‘yes.’

We also are selling subscriptions to municipal departments. We have constituents talking about municipal issues, and it’s worth it for them to monitor that. We provided it for free for a year and then started charging, and most of the departments have signed on for that. They have full access to all the neighborhood forums in the city and can read and post to all the forums.

We have six or seven departments participating out of 10, including schools, parks & recreation, police, telecom, electric. It’s $99 per month for each department. They can engage with an individual neighborhood or forum as much as they want. If they’re going to fix a playground, they can interact as much as they want. But if they’re going to post a public service announcement, then we limit it to a couple per month. If they want more than that, they can pay an additional fee. Elected officials still get free access, because it makes sense to me, they are the elected representatives for the people and we’re helping both parties talk.

How do the advertisements work? Are they text or graphical?

Wood-Lewis: We’re low tech, we’re email, our emails are plain text. Nothing’s anonymous, and it’s not instantaneous. When people submit a message, it doesn’t get published except in the daily publication. When heavy Web 2.0 users sign up, I usually hear from them in frustration a day later, because they want a Facebook experience where they can push buttons and upload 20 widgets. I tell them to slow down, that this is a different experience. The ads are delivered in plain text emails. We sell them on a per-day basis. Over a three-day period, we hit everybody. It starts at $78 per day and the price drops with volume.

Would you consider getting outside funding?

Wood-Lewis: We are up for a grant from the Case Foundation, which is not a huge amount of money but would be a huge shot in the arm for us…I was involved in a startup in 1999 called ForestWorld.com, a portal for forest products with a sustainable forestry twist. We got a million in investment money, hired 40 people, put up a site and then the bubble burst and the party was over. It was interesting and I learned a lot, but this is a different endeavor.

I want to grow [FPF] carefully. We want to benefit our town, and I’d love to see us grow this across our state and beyond with natural growth out. There might be a chance to grow that significantly, but not yet. I don’t want to get ahead of ourselves. I would take venture capital money at the right time, but we’re not there yet. It could happen later this year. I don’t want this endeavor to be led by the money. We have had some interested parties but we need to stick to our path, but when we need money to accomplish something, then we’ll look for the money. I’m pretty optimistic that we’ll be able to raise funds when we need them.

What are the challenges with getting revenues with hyper-local sites? Can you do it in a scaled way or is it limited to your own community?

Wood-Lewis: It’s a good question and I don’t know the answer. My experience in going around to small businesses, they either don’t know anything or they’re very aggressive and are bidding for Google AdWords. What I’ve decided with our approach is that we have no marketing budget, it’s all been word of mouth. It’s been incredibly successful.

I hope we can do the same thing to attract advertisers. We’ve had 500 local businesses contact us, and 10% of them have put money down. That’s all been because they’ve seen this, and a light bulb went off over their head. It’s not like a florist who doesn’t get the Internet and needs a consultant to help them figure out how to run Google ads.

My gut feeling is that as the web gets more crowded, especially in “local” served up by Yahoo and Google, genuinely local stuff has got to be increasingly valuable. How do you find it? By living there, by word of mouth. That’s why we want to grow it from our neighborhood up to our county, and then to adjacent counties. If we were to parachute into Phoenix right now, it would be tough sledding.

If there is one part of your service that you think you can monetize, what would that be?

Wood-Lewis: I once did a survey about our flagship neighborhood here, after they had the service for five years. I asked how many would be willing to pay a subscription fee. And two-thirds said they would at an average of $40 per year. I was surprised by that. Since then, I added a PayPal button so they can give money voluntarily. Some people came through, and a very small number was OK with paying a regular subscription.

But it’s a real bear. People will say they love the service, that it’s more valuable than the local newspaper or their Newsweek subscription. But then they’ll stop and think about the web, and say it’s more valuable than Craigslist, but Craigslist is free. So the web makes people think that everything should be free. So maybe we could give them the first year free and then start charging a subscription. After a year, people are hooked. But that’s all to be explored.

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What do you think about Front Porch Forum? Do you think there’s a way to make it into a successful business? How? And if you use FPF, what do you like about it and what could be improved? Share your thoughts in the comments below.