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Hyperlocal – Core Dimensions (Part 1)

February 14, 2010 2 comments

This is the second in a series of posts on key dimensions of Hyperlocal. Other posts in this series are:

In the initial post in this series, I introduced the following core dimensions of Hyperlocal/Local:

  1. Local News/Journalism
  2. Local Business/Commerce
  3. Local Advertising
  4. Local Community
  5. HyperLocal Business Models

This post will briefly explore the first 2 dimensions – Local News and Local Business/Commerce.

Local/Hyperlocal News

An important service to the Local community is News about the Community, or Community perspectives and reactions to the News. A nice definition of HyperLocal News is provided by Christopher Wink here: Hyperlocal news: a definition.

Keeping Informed about HyperLocal News Media

Here are a few of the sites I regularly visit to keep track of happenings in the Local/Hyperlocal News media space:

Sites

There are many, many Hyperlocal blogs and websites currently servicing their local communities. Wink provides a nice overview of some of the major ones in his post Hyperlocal news sites worth following.

Platform Providers

This is a core area of innovation at present, and a slew of recent acquisitions by major media companies of hyperlocal news platform providers illustrates this point.

Some of the key innovators:

Citizen Journalism

Often Hyperlocal news sites leverage Citizen Journalists as contributors to their site. A very interesting example of this approach is Examiner.com, which I blogged about here.

Real-time News Feeds

Finally, with the rise of Twitter, real-time geotagged feeds are also breaking onto the scene. Pat Kitano‘s Hyperlocal Curation of Real Time News post from November 2009 provides some interesting examples. Kitano’s Breaking News Network is a powerful example of location-relevant breaking news.

And of course, Twitter has launched location-based Trending Topics, would should add additional impetus to this trend.

Local Business/Commerce

Here, we’re talking about the commercial aspect of HyperLocal. A profound insight into the potential de-coupling of “core” Local News from Local Business services was recently delivered by Clay Shirky at the Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy in September 2009. A must-listen-to presentation IMHO.

There are many, many players and platforms that service local business needs, with many more soon to come no doubt. Here are a smattering of players in a very competitive space:

Business Listings – General

Business Listings – Niche

Services – Niche

Shopping

As you can see, there are a number of different spaces by which software providers and hosting sites are seeking to provide services for local commerce. In the next post, we’ll look at two additional hyperlocal/local dimensions: Advertising and Community.

glenn

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