Hyperlocal seems to be the new buzzword, even though it’s really just a new term for an oldd concept. Basically, a “hyperlocal” site is a website that focuses on just one city, or town, or even a single neighborhood. It’s ideally a place for the residents to go for news and information about the place they live, and mostly it’s the residents themselves who are doing most of the writing. It’s another form of the whole “citizen’s media” things that’s going on, or at least being talked about an awful lot. Some of the examples I’ve found have been:
- Backfence, which has sites covering Reston and McLean, Virginia
- Greensboro101, for Greensboro, North Carolina
- Edhat, for Santa Barbara, California
- iBrattleboro, for Brattleboro, Vermont
- GoSkokie, which also produced a 74-page PDF document on how to build your own hyperlocal site
- MyFolsom, for Folsom California
- Your Auburn, for Auburn California
- The Northwest Voice, for Bakersfield California
And all of this talk has reminded me of my own desire to build a site – I guess you’d call it hyperlocal – for Carson City and Douglas County, Nevada. So that’s why this week I bought a new domain name just for that purpose, aroundcarson.com. Of course I don’t have a site built yet; I just have half-formed thoughts rattling around inside my head. So right now the site just forwards to my Carson City pages here on Computer Vet. And I don’t even know if a site like this will fly yet; like I said yesterday, I’m not seeing a lot of evidence that Carson City is ready for the interactive web. So at first I’ll try to build the site around the kind of stuff I’ve already been doing or had planned for this site: photo galleries, restaurant reviews and menus, links to stories in the local papers, and my own articles. And maybe it will grow from there, into something with blogs and message boards and classified ads, something that other people can add to when I’m not able to. Because, just like this site, I’m going to have to squeeze Around Carson’s development into that half hour every day after the family goes to bed and before I do. But it should be exciting if I can pull it off.
And given my record of procrastination in the past, look for it to launch around 2008.
