Hyperlocal “news” sites like Outside.In and Topix automatically pull feeds from local publishers to re-create a local newspaper. Although there are sporadic comments to articles, there is little community engagement. CitySearch and Yahoo! Local serve as online Yellow Pages.

Engaging hyperlocal sites need “word of mouth”

In many cities, the best hyperlocal sites are developed by somebody, some company or group in the community. In Santa Barbara, Edhat.com, developed by a local software company, has distinguished itself in providing compelling local content.

Hyperlocal social networks a la Ning generally don’t gain traction (show me one that does) because it takes too long for anybody to invest the time to set up a complete profile. Twitter makes hyperlocal communication easy because it can serve as a proxy social network for a local community that “follows” each other. There’s no login/profile setup requirement, just tweet.

Breaking News City sites that aggregate local Twitter feeds across various categories are being developed in cities across the country by individuals, and groups like chambers of commerces, who are hubs of their communities. They invest their time to create a useful hyperlocal community site by providing local Twitterers a venue to gain exposure in the community. There’s energy in facilitating the community conversation that “national” sites like Topix and CitySearch don’t have.

Example Breaking News City sites:

President Obama staged an 80-minute interactive town hall meeting this morning at 11:30 EDT. In the span of an hour or so, he received 92,000 questions online, from which 3.6 million votes were cast voting up/down those questions.

Idea: his administration should create a “White House Connect” application based on a white label Google Friend or Facebook Connect type system. White House Connect could be set up as a governmental social network, that could be extended on national, state and local levels.

Benefits of an Obama Induced Online Society

President Obama has the opportunity to push American society online, with the following benefits to his wired administration:

1. Easier to broadcast messages to a tech savvy media and public, constituents who likely comprise a hotbed of Obama supporters.
2. Engages the public and gives them a feeling of connectedness with his administration.
3. Positions Obama as a populist president using a variety of media, from Jay Leno, to the internet, to communicate his messages as a “real” person, not somebody isolated in an inner sanctum.

In a similar vein, the South Korean government pushed its citizens after the 1998 Asian Financial Crisis to adopt broadband and the Internet, and became a global Internet powerhouse.

Tim O’Reilly’s comprehensive slideshow makes several points about the accelerating speed and syndication of information:

• The real time functionality of the new information distribution systems, elegantly demonstrated by Twitter, is critical to reporting.
• Social Networks facilitate content distribution, and media brands power content credibility

A key function of a publishing brand is the bestowal of status by what you pay attention to

• Advice to major brands like the New York Times: “build the platform and your customers and partners will build features before you do”. Note how the open source Twitter API spawned a riot of applications. The New York Times API, or other media brand APIs can potentially do the same thing – and leverage the content NYT creates and distributes.

Yes, I would like to see Tim’s narrative accompanying the keynote.

(Charts, of course, not based on actual statistics; for descriptive purposes only)

Consumers are increasingly avoiding newspapers — and books, too — because the text mode is now used so infrequently that it can feel like a burden. People are showing a clear preference for a fully formed video experience that comes ready to play on a screen, requiring nothing but our passive attention.

The video mode has been reinforced by the rise of YouTube. In December, almost 100 million viewers in the United States watched 5.9 billion YouTube videos, according to comScore. Tellingly, YouTube has not cannibalized TV viewership — it has instead carved out another chunk of our leisure time for video on a screen.

Yes, this is the virally active video du jour entitled “the History of the Internet“, but I think it’s remarkable explanation. It really explains the evolution of the internet as a electronic network phenomenon that evolved in parallel with telecommunications. Somebody had to explain all that geekiness in 8 minutes because it otherwise would be a dry academic read.

Domus Consulting Group has been a leader in educating the real estate industry on how to use the social media systematically to become hubs within their local community. The mainstream media have the exact same mission to reach out to their community.

We call our system the Social Broadcasting System and invite you to attend a free two-part webinar series specifically focused on demonstrating to producers, journalists and reporters. (And there is absolutely no upsell or even hint of it, we want to show you a revolutionary concept for media business and branding that will increase media market share and thus, revenue opportunities. We’ll show you new business models).

Session #1: Flight 1549, and the Mumbai and Gaza incidents demonstrated how powerful Twitter and citizen reporting has become for breaking news. Tips on the right ways to leverage Facebook and other social networks to reach your audience.
Session #2: How the Social Media and Mainstream Media are converging based on the new “Breaking News” reporting paradigm. Explaining a new business model: how to connect your news network into massive local social media infrastructures… efficiently and free.

Register for the Free 2-part Webinar Mini-Series

Dates:

* Session 1:  Tuesday, February 3, 2009 at 9am Pacific time
* Session 2:  Tuesday, February 10, 2009 at 9am Pacific time

About Pat Kitano

The Domus Consulting Mini-Series are for educating industries, organizations, companies and individuals who need an efficient and powerful online community presence. We started with the real estate industry, demonstrated how effective social media is in making real estate professionals hubs within their community, and are now offering the same methodology to the news media and to non-profit organizations.

Twitpic takes it place as THE breaking news image source. Why? It’s simple to use and has become a standard. In an extraordinary, emergency situation, citizen journalists have no time to figure out how to send their iPhone snapshots to CNN or any other media outlet. In fact, CNN should just buy or invest in Twitpic now.

Now that opportunistic programmers see the power of a Twitter app like Twitpic, expect development of a new set of apps that facilitate news gathering and reporting. For example, iPhone apps developed by news organizations like NYT might include a camera link that allows its users to send snapshots directly to the news organization.

One snapshot from a ferry spawns a 15-minute celebrity:

TODAY’S ONLINE CONTENT FATIGUE

Web 2.0 could be described as a phase in the evolution of the Internet that facilitated individuals in creating content within the constructs of social websites (blogs) and social networks (as participants). User-generated content was the New New Thing when it first appeared refreshingly on blogs (in 2002 blogs were being recognized as media), MySpace (2003), YouTube (2005) and Facebook (in 2006, it opened up beyond colleges).

Now, the discovery phase of Web 2.0 is over. Thinking bird’s eye level, all the content that needs to be online is now online. For example, there are literally thousands of articles (and videos) about how to raise your credit score, and using Google isn’t really going to help you find the best or most appropriate advice. Conclusion: content creation is now not as highly valued when it’s already ubiquitous and en masse.

However, one kind of content is still prized; it’s in the taglines of CNN and Huffington Post: “Breaking News“. Breaking news, in all its forms from reporting to analysis, holds the most social and economic value – world society reacts, trades and competes with New News.

MEDIA 2.5 – POSITIONING AS THE HUB OF BREAKING NEWS

The mainstream media finally figured out that journalist content creation also didn’t need to be salaried. Breaking news can now be reported by anybody in Mumbai or Gaza. Media measures its worth by traffic, and solidifying the market position of being the hub of Breaking News is where Media 2.5 is headed. That means having producers like CNN’s Tori Blase on Twitter’s front lines receiving and monitoring news stories and alerts from her Twitter network. This reinforces CNN’s status as the breaking news hub when it has dispatches at the borders of citizen journalism. News sourcing is social, every news producer must do this to stay connected with the new citizen news sources and be relevant in the future.

WEB 2.5 – EMPOWERING WEB 2.0 INDIVIDUALS TO CREATE BREAKING NEWS MEDIA HUBS

The New New Media Properties have none of the mainstream media overhead and infrastructure for collecting breaking news – Huffington Post, Politico and video-based Funny or Die are the collaborative media that Web 2.0 facilitates. All they need are writers/video producers who want syndication, and what aspiring journalists/producers will turn that opportunity down? These sites have become talent agencies that trade talent exposure for content quality, and in turn elevates their online presence and traffic.

The window is open, but nobody sees it’s open yet. Any organization, company or even a team of like-minded individuals can now create Politico-type blog network/breaking news distribution properties cheaply by leveraging Web 2.0’s blog and website design applications. A key distinction needs to be made in developing a media property – the content being created and distributed must be quality controlled to attract traffic. Social networks built on platforms like Ning won’t work due to noise and content credibility arising from any yahoo who wants to be a participant. The mainstream media understands this distinction and have been augmenting their journalistic offering with a J-School trained blogger corps (examples: NYT, SFGate), basically trading in the name “column” for “blog”.

Web 2.0 facilitates individuals. Web 2.5 facilitates the development of collaborative websites. The real estate industry in particular can leverage Web 2.0 tools to create collaborative websites that position real estate agents as local “reporters”. Properties like Homescopes leverage Web 2.0-savvy real estate professionals to break local news like the details of recent home sales only they would know about. Seth Godin mentions today that real estate brokerages should create local e-newsletters… this idea aligns with the idea of real estate agent as reporter.

You wouldn’t buy GM stock today without checking Marketwatch.com, and consumers will soon understand they won’t put an offer on a house (in this weird market!) based on month-old data. Breaking news is the killer app.

WEB 2.5 – LEVERAGING THE MEDIA HUB TO ATTRACT TRAFFIC (AND ONLINE FAME)

If you want evidence that content creation is taking a back seat to content distribution, see Justin.TV, an online streaming media application initially launched to allow the masses to chronicle their lives in video. Unfortunately, most people’s 24-by-7 lives are excruciatingly boring, and Justin.TV has evolved into the leading do-it-yourself online Cable Access channel network that facilitates anybody who wants to “program” online TV. Naturally, the most in-demand content are the free broadcasts of subscription streams of sporting events and movies… value-based content is king.

And just so content creators won’t complain that I’m positing the “death of content”, on the contrary, good content creators will now flourish, and gain access to exposure and fame much more easily with the proliferation of the new Web 2.5 content distribution channels (and let’s just call them media).

Media hubs/channels are the antidote to content fatigue by facilitating relevant filtering for discovery of great stuff. Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop and Jason Calacanis’ Mahalo are based on nothing more than the collaborative insights of what is online good “breaking news” content. Somewhat autocratic, but a simple formula. It’s no coincidence that both Guy and Jason have attuned themselves to real time trends as well-networked Twitter celebs.

What I’m trying to say is – the opportunity is build these media hubs is wide open and easy to do… the challenge is to convince your network to participate in your hub. This is the spirit of post-Web 2.0.

The spammer’s objective ostensibly seems to be to get Twitterers to click on their profile link (in the cases above, the link is a completely spammy website.)

Within a few hours, Twitter management suspends the site:

Twitter’s Philosophical Dilemma – Explicit Spamming to Build a Following is a No No but Now it Seems Everybody wants to Build their Following Quickly

#1:Twitter started out, and continues to be viewed as a public IM tool that is shared across walled social networks. At first, philosophically, building a large Twitter network of random followers seemed to run afoul of Twitter’s implicit intention that Twitter conversations should maintain relevancy across a network, or “follower” base.

#2: Twitter users like @JasonCalacanis and others started building massive stranger networks because Twitter’s unilateral “follow” clickthrough was so simple. Twitter changed the chat paradigm from private walled communication to a public broadcasting medium.

#3: Yes, spammers spend a few hours on a keyboard with the express purpose of promoting their site, and it runs counter to the social philosophy of Web 2.0. However, most Twitterers will agree that following 2,000 in one fell swoop is the quickest way to build a follower base, provided you are not suspended.

#4: As more Twitterers understand the power of Twitter as a broadcast medium, the more they start actively building their network / follower base. They look for tricks without spamming to get new followers quickly.

I notice the most efficient way to build a random follower base without spamming is to “Follow the Followers of Spammers”. Since the Followers of Spammers will apparently follow anybody who follows them (including spammers), they will also follow you. It’s a hidden game that many Twitterers quietly play.

Silly conclusion: Twitter spammers are part of Twitter’s ecology and are here to stay.

—————————

Interesting update: almost all the followers of @skalua are Twitter spammers. Does this suggest that the Twitter spams are originating from one source? Here is the first page of @skalua’s spamalot followers:

	ilovenewyork88 follow You are now following ilovenewyork88 remove
	magneticguru29 follow You are now following magneticguru29 remove
	5figuresmonthly follow You are now following 5figuresmonthly remove
	iretiredat22 follow You are now following iretiredat22 remove
	onlinesecrets41 follow You are now following onlinesecrets41 remove
	onlineweb20gu follow You are now following onlineweb20gu remove
	trafficformulaM follow You are now following trafficformulaM remove
	therichjerk222 follow You are now following therichjerk222 remove
	trafficmentor22 follow You are now following trafficmentor22 remove
	ilovesalsa22 follow You are now following ilovesalsa22 remove
	leslieonline22 follow You are now following leslieonline22 remove
	maniacwicked99 follow You are now following maniacwicked99 remove
	kevintheman99 follow You are now following kevintheman99 remove
	joeythementor22 follow You are now following joeythementor22 remove
	mlmsecrets09 follow You are now following mlmsecrets09 remove
	dooby04 follow You are now following dooby04 remove
	marketingguru88 follow You are now following marketingguru88 remove
	guruman9289hfdb follow You are now following guruman9289hfdb remove
	carolinafootbal follow You are now following carolinafootbal remove
	marketingman298 follow You are now following marketingman298 remove

Razorfish, the new media ad agency, and its CEO Shiv Singh explain the potential power of Facebook Connect to bring social groups (”the social graph”) into transactional websites. Brilliant presentation…