Kansas City Originals

This is a good example of a local assocation to promote local independent restaurants.

Read more at www.kansascitymenus.com...

Reading leads to meeting

Written biographical and autobiographical material may raise as many questions as it answers, and this is a good thing

For example, after I wrote someone that I had Googled them and had learned a lot, they wrote back "now the mystique is gone." But actually, knowledge of these facts X, Y, and Z only made me want to ask her in person "How did you feel about X? What did you like about Y and Z?" etc. Information led to interest, which led to communication.

Might we view the entire human-readable portion of the internet as ultimately an introducer to real people? Going yet further, might we not say that even the goods and services a person provides are ultimately a set-up for that person's interactions with other people? (The "Nearish" project was inspired partly by the personal-relationship-as-center-of-life value embraced by the "people of the Book.")

To just be together and to "just live"--is the rest of life a means to this end, or to an end somehow like this?

Get your customers to write testimonials for you

As a consumer (and this is the view you should consider first), I'd like to see plenty of testimonials for anyone offering a product or service or idea.

As an employee, to receive testimonials from customers would be a perk that I would count as part of my compensation.

As a business owner, you can use the testimonials as feedback on what specifically you and your people are doing right. And don't forget to look for what you're doing wrong. You may be able to read this between the lines: In what ways are they not praising you?

The best testimonials are those written to a third party. Get them by listing customers as references. Ask your customers whether they would like to be on the list.

Read more at www.netterweb.com/searc...

Advertise under an umbrella

It might be more cost-effective for many small merchants in a neighborhood to advertise under one umbrella brand. By advertising as though they were a "virtual department sore" they could reduce their advertising overhead to something nearer that of a big box store. Of course they would retain individual ownership, management, creative control, and personal service. The brand's supporting web site should be built accordingly.

Google ought to advertise itself -- its own search properties such as Google Local and Froogle -- branded for local merchants' associations. Its recent acquisition of an ad agency could help:

Read more at news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/bus...

Outsource to rural U.S.A.

If you must outsource, outsource to someone Nearish.

The market is beginning to encourage this: As economics would predict, the years of outsourcing to India have led to double-digit wage inflation there. Now the rural U.S. is beginning to look more attractive. One advantage is cultural similarity to employers and to clients.

Read more at www.google.com/search?q...

Network effects and local communities

Richard Akerman in Science Library Pad makes a good point (content should be accessible globally) and counterpoint (which I interpret as "content that is produced locally should be hosted locally").

"The network effect means that an active site with a lot of users will attract more users.This is one of the reasons I think initiatives like OCLC WorldCat reviews will have a hard time gaining traction. Hasn't Amazon won the mindshare for book reviews?. . . ."

"On the other hand, if your site is just a list of pointers that say e.g., 'use connotea for bookmarking,' not only are your scientists gaining the benefit of bookmarking in a collaborative space with other scientists.... but they're also taking a risk, as is your organization. Connotea blows up? Good bye local collective organization wisdom."

Already I've been finding myself wanting to write my book reviews on my own site or blog and link from there to Amazon's page for the book in question, rather than (or in addition to) posting the reviews on Amazon's site. Others viewing Amazon's page for the book would still find my review, using a third-party annotation reader such as the W3C's Annotea or the recently-released "Blogger Web Comments for Firefox." Meanwhile, people in my local community could find my review through local indices or local search.

This basic pattern (host locally for search globally) follows naturally from the structure of the web itself. It can be applied not only to bookstores and libraries but to other merchants and service providers, and anyone else who organizes an activity that is "local" geographically or even socially. It could be applied to consumer reviews of products and services purchased from local merchants, who could host the reviews and/or let their customers host their own. Either way, on their own sites, merchants could always add their own replies and suggestions. This demonstration of expertise would draw relational buyers to the store just as surely as would a low price or close proximity.

The remaining portions of the solution are local organizational indexing, proximity-based web search, and (as Richard Akerman suggests) protocols to facilitate aggregation. Libraries and local chambers of commerce already do local indexing. Google Local and now Froogle (since the November introduction of of Google Base) provide proximity-based search, (as do some social networking sites including Friendster). The bases of the required metadata schema probably already exist in a business-to-business (B2B) context. The key will be to integrate the first two elements now and, soon, the third.

Arguably, consumers (and thus producers) benefit more when data is stored and interchanged in standardized formats than when it is stored in standardized repositories. To standardize on interfaces between functions enables competition on a fine scale, because each function can be provided by a "best of breed" provider.

The market thrives when firms can specialize. Our modern competitive telephone network is based on standardized protocols, and thus far, standards (whether as data formats, such as HTML, JPG, and XML; or as interchange protocols, such as FTP, SMTP, POP, and HTTP) have comprised the DNA of each organism in the internet symbiosis. Next-generation standards building on the "semantic web" ideas are likely to be essential to the continued success of the internet and to our networked life.

My bottom line for merchants, or producers in general -- anyone with a product, service, information, or organization to offer -- is this: Write down today what you have to offer and publish that list to the web where it can be searched. Do this now. Over time there will be better ways to do this, and we should expect that any web service will get cheaper. In fact, it was for this reason that I waited two years to launch Nearish.com after conceiving the idea in spring 2003. But as of last month, Google Base is free of cost to you, it does not require any specialized file formats that would lock you into Google's solution, and to create your list requires only a spreadsheet such as Excel. Therefore, how could an online presence get any cheaper, and why should you delay? Go for it!

Submit your local store inventory to Froogle

Earlier this year I established Nearish.com to promote local commerce. In my May 7 article I described how local merchants can use Google Local and Froogle to attract web-savvy shoppers at little cost. On November 30, Google explained how merchants can use its new Google Base to do this more easily. The "clicks-and-mortar" concept is catching on.

Read more at googlebase.blogspot.com...