Placeblogger.com is the largest index of placeblogs which can help anyone find local bloggers in their community. It was motivated by a desire to find out just how many placeblogs there really are. At BloggerCon IV a bet between Williams, Dan Gillmor and Jay Rosen broke out about this very topic. Rosen wondered how many placeblogs like H2OTown existed, to which Williams guessed 1,000.

Within the first day after its launch, January 2007, Placebloger.com was indexing placeblogs from 55 different countries. To date Placeblogger.com has indexed 3,500 placeblogs. Williams won the bet three times over.

Main Goal(s):

H2OTown: “To make Watertown a less boring place to live.” The blog network is not journalistic in nature. Civic participation and being a conduit of newsworthy information is a byproduct, not the motivating factor, of H2OTown. The real goal of H2OTown is to highlight the aspects of the community that make it unique but are hidden from people, says Williams.

“Placebloggers have a rock and hammer and are breaking through that and sharing that information in a group activity.”

Placeblogger: To find and index as many placeblogs as possible, so they can connect and learn from each other.

Notable Achievements:

H2OTown: “That the blog is still around,” says Williams. Sixty-six percent of all blogs are abandoned in the first month. Today, people feel a sense of ownership over the site, which has a life of its own, and that’s the hard part for a hyperlocal site.

Placeblogger: Placeblogger has been successful, incorporating a larger global community than expected spanning 55 countries and 3,500 blogs. Recently Placeblogger won a Knight News Challenge grant and will expand from there.

A Surprising Realization: The statistics from Placeblogger.com. There were more placeblogs than Williams expected. Comparing census data alongside that Williams found that almost a third of the U.S. lives in a town with a placeblog.

In terms of placeblogs, Williams is astounded by how complex and different they all are from each other. They haven’t settled on a convention, there is no common theme or vocabulary, “yet the format and overarching idea is pretty much the same — they are going to cover the mayors office, elections, school budgets, etc.,” says Williams. Despite similarities, to date there is no community for placebloggers.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: The assumption that a community will pop out of thin air instantly because you’ve started a website. One has to be ready to commit six months to a year before they can expect results. “You can’t speed up the process of creating an organic community,” says Williams. If participation is not instant, one shouldn’t feel as if they failed.

“But I don’t think of any experiment as a failure — they all produce data — “this doesn’t work” is a useful piece of data. My strategy has been to experiment a lot and keep the cost low.”

Money: H2OTown pays for itself, mostly because it’s insanely cheap. Jan Shafer from J-Lab did a survey of people doing sites like H2OTown and found that most don’t make any significant money — they pay for themselves because they cost around $40 a month.

Future Goals: One of the things that placeblogger.com tries to remedy is that these local sites have low search engine results. The goal is to expand the key word based world from one based solely on “what” based questions on Google to a “where” based search world. To be able to find everything on the web within 20 blocks of an address.

For H2OTown: Williams intends to add social networking features, like buddy lists, to the current site. When you read the news now, you don’t know that anybody else is there. Does the news experience change if that element is added? “What happens when your newspaper is a social networking site,” asked Williams.

What do you hope to get from people attending this conference?

“I hope we don’t get in a ditch about the whole blog versus journalism thing. We could go on about that values conflict forever. It’s a conflict that never goes anywhere, you never change anybody’s mind and don’t get any new information. We are in a good time and place for change.

The original site, a labor of love, was updated by hand every week in static HTML. Eventually, Fresno Famous switched over to Drupal which allowed everyone to post directly to the site and enabled forums, comments and blog posts. It has also become a hub for people to get informed about city council meetings, school board decisions and local politics in general. Today the site is totally user-driven.

Main Goal of Fresno Famous: To make Fresno a better place to live. As small farming communities, Fresno and Modesto have reputations of being “the armpit of California and that’s not really true. There is a lot of great talent there — but the community is very fragmented they might not know about local politics, music or events,” says Euston. “Fresno Famous provides one place for everyone to feed on everything that we thought was good about the town.”

Notable Achievements: As a community center Fresno Famous has played an active role in the discussion of downtown Fresno’s redevelopment. In one particular instance, plans for a project on Broadway Row were released on Fresno Famous to a hailstorm of complaints that eventually convinced the city government to cancel the plan.

“Fresno Famous has influenced how the city thinks about the issue…which is a perennial topic of conversation if you live in Fresno,” said Euston.

A Surprising Realization: The first surprise with Fresno Famous was the general timidity of users in the beginning. Euston found that it’s not easy to get people to promote themselves or friends. “We thought once we had Drupal going people would be positing all the time about how great some event was,” says Euston. She found that as community manager she also had to play the role of cheerleader, encouraging and supporting people who were too nervous to post to the site. “Being a blogger, I don’t have a problem with that [postings thoughts online], but a lot of people weren’t sure what to do.”

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: Being too cautious in the beginning. Fresno Famous didn’t allow people to embed any code other than HTML into their blog posts, which meant no Youtube videos, flash graphics, etc. There was a general fear of negative participation. “We thought people would take advantage of that and screw with the site,” said Euston. As such, Fresno Famous didn’t allow anonymous comments.

There was a process of learning to trust the community to do whatever it wanted. But since allowing the community more freedom the site has had almost no issues. “Fresno Famous is a real community with a geographic counterpart. Because people see each other in coffee shops around town, they behave online,” says Euston.

Money: Fresno Famous was based completely on advertising revenue and made enough to hire two full time employees and a few part-timers. In December of 2006 Fresno Famous, which had over 2,000 users, was sold to McClatchy which owned the Fresno Bee.

Future Goals: Almost one year since the sale not much about the site has changed, according to Euston. Today Euston is working towards her MBA at Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. She intends to stay in the online media space on the business development side.

What do you hope to get from people attending this conference?

“I want to hear from some of the success stories, why they think they’ve been successful and able to harness communities and motivate them to participate in a site.

Wilpers had the idea of running excerpts from local Boston blogs on both the website and in the actual print newspaper at a Media Giraffe conference. Slowly Wilpers began to introduce himself to local bloggers in Boston and eventually organized two open meetings. The first gathering was somewhat confrontational, filled with critical and suspicious questions: “Will you edit us? Will you pay us?” etc., but by the second meeting bloggers brought constructive ideas and began to give suggestions for the young paper, says Wilpers.

BostonNOW has become the first US print paper to run content from local bloggers, making the paper “fun, intriguing and reflective of the Boston community,” says Wilpers. The first blog post appeared in the paper May 1st, a few weeks after the initial launch. Since then BostonNOW has registered over 500 Boston bloggers to appear on their website and their paper.

Main Goal of BostonNOW: The goal of the company, as a free daily newspaper, is to grab a healthy market share of readers. BostonNOW, like other free metro papers, serves the market of people that want to consume the important news of the day, but can only spare 20 minutes during their daily commute.

But BostonNOW is also a laboratory to test how a community can be involved in the creation of a print product. That includes everything from the articles that the paper runs to the daily news meetings, which BostonNOW webcasts. “If we don’t involve the community in the direction of the paper, print journalism will become less and less relevant,” says Wilpers.

Notable Achievements: With no advertising or marketing BostonNOW has registered over 500 bloggers in 12 weeks. Today the paper is “out in the community” hosting events and aggressively looking for more bloggers. Wilpers attributes their success in part to the structure of BostonNOW’s homepage, which dedicates a third of its space to publishing the work of bloggers in the community. Posts are ordered chronologically, guaranteeing everyone some time on the homepage.

A Surprising Realization: Wilpers was very surprised by the enthusiasm of bloggers for a product that is not typical to their demographic. Most of the bloggers for BostonNOW are 20-30-years-old and readily admit that they don’t read a paper.

It’s a tough sell at first, said Wilpers. But their enthusiasm mimics the moment when a television camera points to a crowd and everyone begins to scream uncontrollably. “There is some magic from being in a paper that is seen by 100,000 people,” says Wilpers. Tech savvy folks find it an attractive proposition — the print industry becomes a kind of flyer or promotional vehicle for work they are doing on their own websites.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: Early on, BostonNOW excerpted a post from the Bostonist, giving full credit to the authors but taking the post without first asking permission. Wilpers called to apologies after complaints had been received and created a working relationship between the Bostonists and BostonNOW that lasted throughout his time at the news organization.

But the initial lesson had been learned. Even though the author of the Bostonist was excited to appear in the paper, she felt as if her work had been stolen. Not all bloggers will throw themselves at the paper, especially when they already have readers that number in the thousands.

In the aftermath and with the right conflict management, the Bostonist has become a supporter of BostonNOW. “We took someone who had no interest in daily newspapers, got all of her news on the web, and all of the sudden she was proselytizing for a print product,” says Wilpers.

Another more practical lesson learned: BostonNOW launched the paper before the website was up. As a result, no bloggers were included in the first issue. As the BostonNOW model expands to other cities, Wilpers says the company will not make the same mistake. The key is to do the proper spade work to garner a blogging community before the release of its first edition.

Money: For the Paper: The business model is based solely on advertising, there are no paid subscribers.

“People love free stuff if it’s a quality product,” says Wilpers. Free papers have proven they can stay afloat and the Metro brand has shown it can be a successful model. BostonNOW hopes the inclusion of bloggers will make the difference and draw more readers and advertising revenue.

For the bloggers: In the initial 3-6 months BostonNOW has not paid bloggers, but does drive traffic back to their websites. The company does recognize that when they excerpt a blog it is a value judgment on their part, an editorial decision. That value is not overlooked and the company does want to create a method of compensation for bloggers. BostonNOW is currently in talks with the national writer’s union to figure out a system of contracts that would fairly pay bloggers for their work.

Future Goals: BostonNOW’s next goal is to take this idea on the road to other papers around the United States. The company hopes to expand to 10 newspapers over the next three years. We should be seeing number two sometime this fall. The city has yet to be announced.

Wilpers has left BostonNOW and is currently “out there on my own pushing mainstream media into accepting and embracing the new world of the Smart Web, consumer involvement (online and in print), and the building of sustainable (exclusive) communities on their turf.”

What Are you Hoping to Get from other People at the News Innovation Conference?

“I want to find out what other people are doing that I haven’t though of yet — how they have gotten members of the community involved in what they are doing, I want to complement them by stealing ideas.”

By May of 2004, Baristanet launched its beta. Today Galant and co-founder/partner Liz George employ four people working part-time as reporters, graphic artists and technology experts for Baristanet, which is one of the leading placeblogs in the country. The site has gone from 200 to more than 7,000 visits a day and has been recognized as the inspiration for hyperlocal blogs across the country. “For people who live here this is something they become addicted to,” says Galant.

Main Goal of Baristanet: To provide a new model for local news and discussion that is fast, fun and can support itself through online advertising. “Sometimes we refer to it as ‘your local weekly newspaper meets the Daily Show.’” Baristanet is a hybrid of media news and entertainment. The goal is to provide fun coverage of local issues that are important and includes the community that has gathered around the site while creating a sustainable business model at the same time.

An example of hyperlocal coverage: Last summer there was a microburst (like a tornado) in Montclair which devastated 100-year-old trees and “we covered it like crazy…. coverage that we are very proud of” says Galant.

Notable Achievements: Since launching, Baristanet has become a major competitor in the local market, with a bigger circulation in unique visitors online than the Montclair Times, according to Galant. It was named the #1 placeblog in American by Placeblogger.com last January. It has been referenced more than once in The New York Times, which culls its page for story ideas, says Galant.

During a fire induced blackout last summer Baristanet’s traffic increased 50 percent (despite the lack of electricity in many areas). During the emergency situation the site became a powerful resource for the community. In 100 degree weather Baristanet has provided info to the city that even the town website and police weren’t giving says Galant. Whether it’s a manhole explosion, murder or blackout, people come to Baristanet to see if they are covering it, “and if it isn’t covered already, readers send in tip to make sure it is.”

Aside from traditional reporting, the size and local focus has given Baristanet opportunities to experiment in online journalism. From using a Google mash-up to chronicle local development, to using a national polling company to perform hyperlocal polls in each of the three towns it covers (providing a uniquely statistical view of community feelings about specific town issues), Baristanet has set the tone for what hyperlocal news blogs can do.

A Surprising Realization: Even though you may own a publication or an online site, once you open it up to comments it really is an interactive space, says Galant. “Its personality develops on its own. You can set a tone, but it has become something bigger and different.” Strong personalities emerge and have shaped Baristanet into something that Galant never could have envisioned. “The community inhabits it in a way that is strange, sometimes beautiful and sometimes disturbing,” says Galant.

Biggest Practical Lesson/Mistake: On a practical level: If Galant could have done it again, she wouldn’t have set up Baristanet to blog on weekends. Unsure when people would read the site during the initial launch, Baristanet had fresh content all week long. She didn’t find out until months later that people tend to read the site Monday through Friday. “But now our readers are spoiled, so we keep up the weekends.”

In her guest post at PressThink Galant also wrote about the lessons learned while working in an immediate medium.

“There’s also the real-time aspect of what can be accomplished by instant publishing. Like telling readers about kids selling lemonade to raise money for Katrina right now, or reporting a high school bomb scare minutes after it happened-– or even just providing an up-to-date community resource for closings and cancellations in the case of snow.”

Money: Baristanet and its four part-time employees are supported by advertising and has been operating in the black for the last two years. Baristanet also pays people to write and do graphics for the ads. Glanat says they often receive five local business advertising inquiries a week and has around 30-40 regular advertisers right now including Realtors, Montclair State University, a local hospital, retailers, services, restaurants and other city institutions.

Future Goals: Conversations with two separate people/organizations are on the table about expanding Baristanet into new cities. Nothing has been decided, but it is something Galant is looking into. Baristanet is also interested in forging alliances with other placeblogs to form ad networks and to share certain content.

What Are you Hoping to Get from other People at the News Innovation Conference?

“We are open for strategic partnerships in terms of expansion. We have an expertise and ability to make the model work and we are looking for capital to make it expand and looking for the right partners.”

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Extra Reading: Galant’s guest post on PressThink (Good personal history)

Liz George’s guest post on PressThink (Her review of Backfence)