Notes from today's Hyperlocal conference

  We're having a hyperlocal conference at NYU today, and it's good!
  Hard to get a word in, so I'm going to take notes here.
  In defense of hyperlocal, communities have long-term issues, just like cities and countries do.
  For example, in the East Village, there's gentrification, a sense that the history of the area is being deleted. For me safety of bike riding is an issue, as it is for other residents.
  There are a lot of journalists here, and they tend to think journalism is the big deal. I think blogging is a big deal. And no, I don't think they understand what blogging is. But that would take a lot of talking to explain and probably wouldn't create much understanding.
  The question of how to involve the community is still the wrong way to look at it. The site is of the community. Give everyone who lives in the community a blog of their own and make the front page a curated aggregation of the blogs. At first yours will be the only one, but if you gain traction it won't be that way for long.
  Jay asks people to think in terms of 100 percent coverage, a familiar theme of his. The people who think it's all about journalism grab the mike and snap right back that it's important to "involve the community." Bzzzzt. Wrong.
  I did get up and speak and said all this, and added that when the comments get to be too much it might be time to offer everyone a blog on your domain, and gradually transition to a Kos-like approach. That's what we did in the early days of Scripting News. A lot of the original blogs formed out of the discussion group on userland.com.
  During the break the question came up about this bit from a previous post: "Be sure you control your own publishing and distribution. It must be tempting now, and it's likely to get more tempting in the future, to accept the offers of the big tech companies." Did I mean that people shouldn't do syndication? No, that would be a weird thing for a guy who pushed RSS as much as I did to say. I meant don't depend on Facebook, Twitter and Google to be your publishing and/or community system. For all the reasons in the piece. These are not good platforms for journalism or blogging.