Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Lisa Williams is giving a Berkman Tuesday lunch talk. The room is packed. Dan Gillmor introduces her. (She generously credits the Berkman Center with supporting her and helping her develop her ideas.) [As always, I'm paraphrasing. It sounds choppy only because of the way I'm taking these notes.]

Dan says that he's proud to be associated with Lisa's PlaceBlogger.com project. (Lisa runs H20Town.info, a place-blog for Watertown, MA.) PlaceBlogger began with Lisa betting Jay Rosen that she could find 1,000 placeblogs. So far, she's found 700. A placeblog "is an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time." It's about the "lived experience" of a site. "It's not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism." (She says there are almost 20,000 incorporated locations, so 1,000 would be 5%.)

PlaceBlogger.com (designed by Bryght) helps people discover sites that talk about their area. It'll let you download an OPML llist of sites so you don't have to come back. Among the goals, in addition to the helping people find placeblogs: Help drive a geotagging standard and encourage Drupal development. Also, it will provide data for answering the Big Questions about the role of citizen journalism.

Lisa says her biggest obstacle is "personal doubt." She sometimes thinks it's the "stupidest idea" she's ever had. But, she says, she forces herself to get over it. [It is not a stupid idea, Lisa.] She shows a pre-alpha aggregation of local stories about election day.

Future developments: Live mapping. Aggregating tagged material from the larger Web. Letting users have personal views.

Early on while doing H20Town she had the insight that almost all "small towns are cities are comic operas with property taxes."

PlaceBlogger only gives headlines and the first 200 characters of the post in order to move readers out of PlaceBlogger and to the placeblogs. (The headlines and characters come from the blogs' RSS feeds.)

Most of the placeblogs, she says, are on the borders of cities, communities of 25-70K, perhaps because they're in a media "shadow." She's done some analysis and projection that shows that if placeblogs increase at the current rate, by 2010, they'd cover 102M people, some percentage of which would be readers. She believes you need consistent contributions by a small group of dedicated people to make more casual contributions possible. (Baristanet is an exception; it has lots of consistent contributors, she says.) That's good because you can do a lot with a little.

She says people should beware the Wizard of Oz syndrome, in which one is awed by what turns out to be just a little man behind a curtain.

Next steps, she says, include getting placeblogs on newspaper sites, going through Petersen Guide to colleges because college towns tend to have lots of placeblogs, sweeping the counties for blogs, and hoping that people will identify their placeblogs. [Real estate sites also should be interested in pointing people at PlaceBlogs.]

Challenges to placeblogs: Lots of placeblogs have relatively small readerships because they're local, which means they don't do well with advertisers.

Q: When will PlaceBlogger be visitable?
A: Later on this evening you'll be able to apply to see the alpha. I'm particularly interested in people using RSS aggregators to read it to see if it breaks.

Q: (Ethanz) In my community, there's a large set of placeblogs that are hateful and useless. How are you going to put context around such posts?
A: The left column on the home page is my blog where I can provide context. In the center, the "recent popular content" provides a different type of filtering.

Q: Do you do any filtering? Do you accept all placeblogs?
A: I don't want to aggregate political blogs that talk about national issues because they're too easy to find. I haven't found any porn placeblogs or any KKK placeblogs. I'd take it on a case by case basis.

Q: What's your vision for this? That people will find local blogs or that people will browse blogs around the nation? Or both? Or neither?
A: I'm a terrible predictor of what people will want.