I was surprised over the past couple of days after deciding that I’d like to find the Web addresses for as many businesses in my neighborhood as I could. There were more than I expected, though a number of them were pretty hard to locate.
I’ve also been trying to find blogs written by local bloggers, and that has been a challenge, too.
Aaron Weiche of Find Buffalo Blog has a blog that focuses on what it’s like to run a Web portal around a local community – in his case Buffalo, Minnesota.
In his latest post, he brings us a Local Search One-on-One: Paul Jahn & Matt McGee. Some very nice ideas and suggestions in the post for people who might be interested in building a community for a community.
EarlPearl, who often comments here and is active on a number of forums, sent me a link earlier today from Greg Sterling written back in January, which is worth considering as well: Building the “Local Internet” Brick by Brick.
There is a lot of potential for sites based around communities, and a lot of ideas on how to build those sites. It’s going to be interesting to watch the many different ways that such a portal can make a difference to a place, and how sites for places can get the people in those places involved.
See also, locationportals.net (dead link), which has some interesting posts on “advancing the development of location portals,” as well as John Udell’s post on An experiment in online community.