It turns out that the Internet doesn’t just consolidate countless villages onto one global platform. It can also enable localism and showcase quirky, distinctive variety. One of the earliest examples of Internet-based localism was Meetup.com, which the Howard Dean presidential campaign famously used to bring together supporters in dozens of communities. Now an interesting new website takes online localism to a new level entirely. Placeblogger.com provides a global directory of blogs, wikis and other resources that focus on your neighborhood or town.
What exactly is a “placeblog”? The site describes it as “an act of sustained attention to a particular place over time. It can be done by one person, a defined group of people, or in a way that’s open to community contribution. It’s not a newspaper, though it may contain random acts of journalism. It’s about the lived experience of a place.” The site continues:
_Placeblogs are sometimes called “hyperlocal sites” because some of them focus on news events and items that cover a particular neighborhood in great detail – and in particular, places that might be too physically small or sparsely populated to attract much traditional media coverage. Because of this, many people have associated them with the term “citizen journalism,” or journalism done by non-journalists.
Placeblogs, however, are about something broader than news alone. They’re about the lived experience of a place. That experience may be news, or it may simply be about that part of our lives that isn’t news but creates the texture of our daily lives: our commute, where we eat, conversations with our neighbors, the irritations and delights of living in a particular place among particular people. However, when news happens in a community, placeblogs often cover those events in unique and nontraditional ways, and provide a community watercooler to discuss those events.
Placeblogs spring from a fiercely non-generic America that’s not about big-box retailers or the type of polarizing discussion about politics, culture, and the economy that’s the product of journalism that happens at the 30,000 foot level. Often, they are a delightful and vivid look at cities, towns, and neighborhoods from an insider’s point of view.
The Placeblogger site is still in its early stages. Only 1,119 placeblogs are listed for the United States, and most of the 41 other countries have fewer than 10 blogs listed. Still, the project is a great idea, and has an enormous potential.
The site has an impressive roster of backers: the Center for Citizen Media (Dan Gillmor, author of We The Media: Grassroots Journalism for the People, by the People), Pressthink blog (Jay Rosen, the NYU journalism professor and founder of NewAssignment.net), the Berkman Center, among others. Placeblogger was started and is edited by Lisa Williams, who runs H2otown, a placeblog for Watertown, Massachusetts. If you know of any placeblogs, please add them to the growing list on the site.