Okay, not the best deal imaginable — we all like to get paid for our time and work — but it could be a great deal for someone who’s thinking about starting a neighborhood blog, but not sure they want to do all the startup work on their own. And it’s definitely a good deal for someone who’s not an experienced blogger, interviewer, photographer, reporter, etc. (I, for one, would love free photography training from a pro.)

But the reaction in the comments has been about 4-1 on the negative side. Here’s a sample:

“Volunteers, huh? Why not ask us to pay for the privilege?”

“Forget the goofy incentive plan and provide easy-to-use links to the neighborhood bloggers. If you can’t bring yourself to pay them, put ads on their sidebars. It takes time and costs money to do good blogging.”

“It does seem like, recognizing that there are already neighborhood blogs in most of the Seattle neighborhoods, trying to create a new, parallel system that allows the P-I to monetize the content while not paying the authors is…not what I would want.”

“You get free content, while you teach people what they could easily learn from free information sources on the web, in order to compete with already existing blogs? Stay classy, P-I.”

Some of the comments on the original post, including at least one I reproduced above (the third one down), are from some of the many existing neighborhood bloggers in Seattle. One commenter wonders if this is “sour grapes” from Seattle neighborhood bloggers, and as a completely ignorant outsider, I wondered the same thing. Then again, I live in an area that I think is starved for local blogging and I’d love to see more local blogs spring up.

What are your thoughts on the SeattlePI.com offer? If it was a well-known entity in your hometown doing something similar, would you welcome it or not? Comments are open.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Seattle PI Calls for Volunteer Hyperlocal Bloggers, Gets Angry Reaction

We are trying to find out how hyperlocal blogs and sites are doing their business today – how big they are, how big an area they cover, what’s working in advertising and what’s not. The data they give will be kept anonymous; that is, we’ll release it only in aggregate. We’ll also interview some of you to find out more.

I began the survey and got about four pages in before stopping. Not because it was too difficult or lengthy — but because it started asking about staff, budgets, advertising, start-up costs, and stuff like that. None of those things apply to our real estate blogs. But they probably DO apply to your local news blog, so take the survey here and have your voice be heard.

(thx to @adamoakley for the tip)

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Have you taken CUNY’s Hyperlocal News survey?

Your answers to those questions probably depends on what type of local blogger you are. Our blogs are indirectly designed to promote Cari’s real estate business, so we don’t blog about the rare murder or missing persons report and stuff like that. We have, however, blogged about the local mall shutting down after a robbery. If you’re not running a pure local news blog, these decisions can be difficult.

Whether we like it or not, whether we know it or not, outsiders will be judging our hometowns based on what they read on our local blogs. It’s no different than how newspapers are a reflection of the town they cover. Watch this funny skit by British comedian Jack Dee (esp. the first 3 minutes):

If you agree that your local blog should be an accurate reflection of the town you live in, try this:

1. Step back and read through your blog archives with the eye of an outsider.
2. Look at the tone of voice in your posts: Positive? Negative? Supportive? Critical?
3. Look at the words you use most often: (same as above)
4. Adjust accordingly, but … and this is important … be yourself.

What are your thoughts? Do you think your local blog should be an accurate reflection of the community you write about? Comments are open.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Does Your Blog Reflect Your Community?

It’s called Outside.in for Publishers, and it opens up a new window to getting your local blog content onto other sites … and perhaps even an opportunity to pull in more local content onto your own blogs if you choose.

Up until now, Outside.in has collected local content from blogs and other sources and displayed them on city/town pages on their own domain. Outside.in for Publishers takes your content and basically puts it into a widget of sorts that other sites can embed. In their announcement, Outside.in mentions four local news sites that are already showing additional content via this platform. Here’s a screenshot of the Neighborhood News page on SCNow.com:

In that “More from around the web” section, you might be able to see a bunch of hyperlocal content being pulled in from other sites – including at least one blog – via the Outside.in for Publishers platform. Pretty cool.

I hope to do a deeper look at this soon, esp. in relation to our own hyperlocal blogs. I wonder if Tri-Cities, WA, is big enough to make this work for us. I don’t know if any of the local TV, radio, or newspaper sites are using this (I doubt it), but if there’s enough local content in the system, we might consider adding a news page to our blogs to supplement what we write about. We’ll see. But whether we use it or not, this is a big step where hyperlocal publishing/blogging is concerned.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Outside.in Launches Outside.in for Publishers

“…Forrester’s data suggests that some basic assumptions about hyperlocal need to be reexamined. To start with, Forrester data shows that more consumers care about what’s happening in their country than what’s happening in their neighborhood.”

Let me ask you this: Is there anything more hyperlocal than community swim lessons at the city pool? Not much, right? Well, have a look at this update from the Richland (WA) web site today about what happened when the city finally offered online swim lesson registrations:

“For the first time, Richland Parks & Recreation offered complete on-line registration for its swim lesson program. Within three hours, patrons registered online for 268 individual lessons, generating $5,465 in revenue and reducing in-person registrations by more than half.”

Seriously, 268 in three hours? I’ll be keeping this in mind next time someone suggests that people aren’t interested in hyperlocal information, tools, and services.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Yes, Joe Citizen Does Care About Hyperlocal Stuff

But the rest of us struggle at times. On our four hyperlocal blogs, Cari and I sometimes go 2-3 weeks between posts simply because there’s not always a lot of material that fits what we’re doing. If this sounds familiar to you, here’s a suggestion for five types of web sites you must bookmark and visit on a regular basis to get potential blog content.

1. Schools & School District web sites

There’s a good chance that many of your readers have kids. And even the folks who don’t — you hope they’re smart enough to realize that school-related news still affects them because it affects the overall community, it affects home values in the neighborhood, etc. You really can’t go wrong writing about school-related stuff on a local blog.

Check out your local district web site and the local school sites. Look for News pages that can be bookmarked. Look for newsletters to subscribe to. Look for a Calendar or Events page for information about upcoming school board meetings or student theater productions. All of this makes terrific local blog content.

2. Government web sites

This is something that does impact all your readers. No matter how old, how long they’ve lived in town, etc. … government decisions impact us all.

Look for the same kinds of News and Events pages I mentioned above in the Schools section, and newsletters to sign up for. But also look for financial documents and other official publications that can be read or downloaded, then written about. Look for information about public works projects — street closures and parks are things that affect a lot of people. Bookmark the county health department web site and the emergency services department, too. Look for election information when it’s that time of year. Perhaps most of all, look for a Links page to learn about other city and civic-related web sites you should be reading to keep up on local news.

3. Event Facility & Ticketing web sites

Everyone likes to know about events that are happening in your city. Many of the most successful posts we’ve written on our local blogs are posts that promote local events. (This is especially true because the “official” pages for these events are often very poorly built and have no SEO to help them rank well on Google, Yahoo, etc.)

Bookmark web sites for your local convention center or trade show facility and look for their events calendar. Bookmark the web sites for your local sports facilities and theatrical venues. Bookmark the Ticketmaster web site for your closest arenas and/or stadiums, and pay attention to the upcoming events. All of this is excellent blog material.

4. Local Media & Local Blog web sites

I should hope this is a no-brainer. I’ve said before that, once you start a local blog, you’re now a local journalist. And it’s perfectly normal to follow what other journalists are reporting in your town.

Look for RSS feeds and/or newsletters you can subscribe to so that the local news comes to you more often than you need to go find it. If possible, try to develop relationships with your fellow writers and reporters. You may not have much luck with the traditional media, but working together with other bloggers is a great way to network and get new ideas for local blog content.

5. Social Media web sites

My previous post, How to Use Twitter to Find Local Blog Content, shows how we’ve used Twitter for finding local blog content. I’m sure you can do the same on Facebook, and maybe other sites, too. These are great sites to meet other locals, hear what they’re writing and talking about, and potentially get content ideas to write about.

But I’m not only talking about written content here. You should also visit the Groups page on Flickr and do a search for your hometown. I’m betting you’ll find at least one, if not several groups where local residents are sharing photos and having discussions. This can be a great way to source photos that can add a strong visual element to your blog posts — as long as the local photographers are licensing their photos through Creative Commons. YouTube doesn’t have local groups, but you can do keyword searches to find local videos … never know, you might something funny, cool, unique, or newsworthy. And most YouTube users allow their videos to embedded on other sites.

What Did I Miss?

Over to you: What other types of local web sites are great for getting content and content ideas? What would you add to this list? Comments are open.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

5 Web Sites You Must Bookmark for Hyperlocal Content

One of those saved items is Steve Sherron’s post, Marketing Tips For Your Hyperlocal Blog, in which he shares several ideas that are all good … but one that’s so brain-dead simple I’m slapping myself for not having done this with our local blogs. Steve runs Monroe Scoop and made this:

Seriously, why wouldn’t you put your URL on a t-shirt and wear it around town? Heck, why not make a bunch of them and give them out at local events or via your blog? It’s so simple, but seems to me that it could be so effective. Great exposure for your blog, you’re making people happy by giving them something for free, and they’re spreading the word further than you could’ve by yourself — win, win, win all around.

Great idea, Steve.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Blog Marketing: The Shirt On Your Back

WestRichlandRealEstateBlog.com
RichlandRealEstateBlog.com
KennewickRealEstateBlog.com
PascoRealEstateBlog.net

Many of our most popular posts are about local events that happen every year. (I talk a bit more about the success of our event-based posts in part five of the hyperlocal blogging series from last year.) Of course, if these are annual events, we end up blogging about them again. But there’s a problem:

Last year’s blog post is probably the one that people find in Google, Yahoo, etc.

So this is just a reminder that, when you’re blogging about annual events, be sure to go back to the older posts (that probably rank well) and update them with a link to the current post so people can get the information they want. Like this:

It’s that easy. That’s a screenshot of last year’s post about Richland’s Live at 5 concert series, and it’s the one that ranks highly for several related search terms. So people are finding it via search engines, and can now click the link I added to visit this year’s post about the same event.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Quick Tip: Update Last Year’s Posts

That section on the right called “Daily Double Shot” has a bunch of links that sometimes includes local bloggers. In fact, maybe hard to see on the screenshot, but the 4th story down links to the Vintage Seattle blog.

That’s the kind of exposure local bloggers need. Hope we start seeing more of it from major media sites, although I won’t be holding my breath. Well done, KIRO.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Local Bloggers Need More Exposure Like This

I’ve written before about local bloggers getting no respect, and now there’s several related bits to talk about. Cory Bergman writes about the disrespect that Washington state legislators are showing toward blogs lately, with one saying “Anybody who’s blogging, God love ‘em, they can say and do whatever they want, because they have no liability or responsibility for what they say, because they are not held to any standard, and they shouldn’t be — they’re just individuals editorializing, if you will.” Danny Sullivan talks about similar issues in his post, Dammit, I’m A Journalist, Not A Blogger: Time For Online Journalists To Unite?. And David Mihm tackles some of these same blogging vs. journalism themes with his post, The *Apparent* Death of Journalism. All good reads.

One of the potential problems of having local blogs replace larger, well-funded news rooms is the question, Who’ll do the heavy lifting when it comes to deep, investigative reporting? It’s a legitimate question. The Online Journalism Blog recently investigated some of the current efforts that hyperlocal blogs and web sites are making to do deeper reporting.

On the Reflections of a Newsosaur blog, Richard Anderson writes about how he’s built a sustainable hyperlocal web site/blogging business model covering four communities in Maine:

Our products enhance each other. Professional journalists report news as it happens on the website. Weekly, this news is contextualized, analyzed and printed in the newspaper. Citizens and businesses post timely news and information online and many of their posts also appear in the paper. And two-thirds of our web sites’ front pages are filled with citizen and business posts. We call them, “Neighbors growing together.” Our community networks are the trusted source of news and views.

On the business side of things, Greg Sterling takes a look at what American Towns is up to — specifically the company’s latest growth and revenue numbers. American Towns recently sent out a news release saying it has the “Highest Traffic of Any Network of Hyper-Local Community Websites.”

On a similar note, Peter Krasilovsky checks in with Outside.In about their company’s growth. How about going from 800,000 unique users in September 2008 to 4.2 million today? That’s pretty good. Peter also reveals that Outside.In has future plans to help local bloggers monetize their work.

This is an article from HyperlocalBlogger, a site about the intersection of local search and blogging by Matt McGee.

Hyperlocal News Roundup