Piecing Local Together – Share Your Thoughts — a few thoughts on our lives online

Before I even begin, I want you to know that I’m gathering information and insight and would love to hear from you in the comments section of this post. Your thoughts, advice, and direction make it possible for myself and others to understand all the forces at play and get a better idea of the bigger picture. Thank you in advance.

Ok now that that’s out of the way…

Recently, I’ve been researching and dissecting some of the ways in which people are utilizing the web at a hyper local level. Whether it’s a politician like Mayor Cory Booker who utilizes twitter as a communication tool as he resides over the city of Newark,NJ (@corybooker), or my old highschool choir who update an atrocious looking website with news of upcoming shows and MP3s of their performances. It fascinates me that information is plenty and readily available but that it is also disjointed and buried for individuals to find.

What I want to know more about is YOUR pattern of finding local information on the web.

First, do you even desire local information be it news, sports, politics, education, events, guides, reviews, etc.?

Second, where do you go to find this information if you need it? Is there one centralized place or are you scouring the web and Googling your heart out? Are town halls live-blogged, is there a facebook page for your neighborhood watch group, do your politicians and school officials tweet away, do local businesses have their own newsletter?

Third, well you make up third – just speak your mind freely and send over as many examples as you can about whose doing it well and whose failing miserably. Is your hometown a digital rockstar or are they dropping the ball and missing out?

Thanks again to anyone who contributes to the discussion, your input is what makes this dynamic and rewarding. If you know of anyone else who might be interested in sharing their two cents please feel free to pass this link along, tweet, facebook, or you can be old fashion and tell them about it in person. Cheers!

kareemk

With respect to looking for things to do, through our user testing, we've found that most people spend up to an hour searching for things to do online and they generally start their search on google and triangulate the information on different sites before making a decision on whether to go to one place or another. Context is very important.

This echos my personal behavior. I'll want to read about an event on flavorpill, on the venue's site and read about the location on yelp and new york mag before I make a final decision. Now if only there was a service that aggregated all that information on one page...:)

Matt Cheuvront

There have been grassroots 'local awareness' endeavors launched in most major cities - 'Nashvillest' is a great example of a provider of local information - daily deals, events, and news. On Twitter they report everything from concerts to breaking news to traffic reports. It's this type of grassroots aggregation of information that is making a name for itself on the social web, providing a one-stop-source of information (so you don't have to waste half your day googling and searching - they do it for you!)

Piecing Local Together – Share Your Thoughts

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