This is further evidence of the "neighbor connect" online space heating up. In the past year, I'm aware of at least two dozen significant startups focused on facilitating conversation among people who live near each other. Some, like Localocracy, aim at niches (local ballot issues and related), while others intend to promote a general sense of community.

Strong on Tech, Weak on Traction

Huffington Post/AOL joins MSNBC.com, which acquired EveryBlock.com last year, in this space, as well as many other new VC-backed and boot-strapped entrants. Most startups in this area appear to be strong on tech and weak on traction. That is, they can crank out the code, but few people actually show up and use their product. To make matters worse, many attempt to open up everywhere all at once. As a friend said, "A mile wide and an inch deep."

Front Porch Forum is an established leader in this space, with amazing traction in our state, Vermont. More than half of our primary city participates. In another FPF town, 75 percent of members post -- much higher than the 1-10 percent seen on many social sites. And the member success stories flow through FPF faster than we can write them down. People use FPF to reduce crime, find jobs, give away baby gear, reunite with lost pets, recommend roofers, debate ballot measures, call city hall on the carpet, and much more.

With our new web application recently launched, we look forward to bringing Front Porch Forum to communities far and wide.

A version of this story first appeared on the Front Porch Forum blog.

NPR recently covered political scientist Daniel Aldrich's work looking at how neighbors help each other during disasters. From NPR:

Aldrich's findings show that ambulances and firetrucks and government aid are not the principal ways most people survive ... a disaster. Government interventions cannot bring neighborhoods back, and most emergency responders take far too long to get to the scene. Rather, it is the personal ties among members of a community that determine survival during a disaster, and recovery in its aftermath.

When Aldrich visited villages in India hit by the giant 2004 tsunami, he found that villagers who fared best after the disaster weren't those with the most money, or the most power. They were people who knew lots of other people -- the most socially connected individuals. In Japan, Aldrich found that firetrucks and ambulances didn't save the most lives after earthquakes. Neighbors did.

We watched this phenomenon on Front Porch Forum, an online community-building service, this spring when flood waters ravaged many Vermont communities and people rallied to help those who lived nearby.

Isolation or Benefits?

Meanwhile, Keith Hampton and his Pew colleagues ask: "Do [social-networking sites] isolate people and truncate their relationships? Or are there benefits associated with being connected to others in this way?"

In their fascinating report, they share several observations from their survey, among them: "In this Pew Internet sample, 79 percent of American adults said they used the Internet and nearly half of adults (47 percent) say they use at least one of the social-networking sites." The adults surveyed are using Facebook mostly to connect with people from their past -- high school, college, family. Facebook doesn't appear to be used much among current neighbors (see chart above), less than 2 percent in this survey.

Hampton's earlier work (an e-neighbors study and a previous Pew study) suggests that online social networking can indeed help neighbors connect. And Portia Krebs of USTelecom, the broadband association, reported this past week:

Consider this: 28 percent of Americans know none of their neighbors by name, and fewer than half of American adults know most or all of their neighbors. According to the Pew Internet & American Life Project, Americans who go online daily are more likely than non-Internet users to know some of their neighbors' names -- and 27 percent of Internet users said they used digital tools to talk to their neighbors and keep informed about community issues.

Front Porch Forum -- a neighborhood-based network serving small cities and towns -- gives registered users an opportunity to discuss everything from road repairs to the school budget. According to FPF, half of the residents of Burlington, Va., subscribe -- and an astonishing 90 percent of those users said their local civic engagement increased thanks to this online service.

Facebook works incredibly well to help connect old acquaintances. But it's not so good at helping neighbors find each other. Perhaps that's because Facebook is all software and no community management. The role of effective online community management is to bring diverse people together online in civil and constructive conversation. Venture capitalist Fred Wilson weighed in recently on this point:

Modern community building isn't easy but if there is one thing the Internet has taught me over the past 15 years, large engaged communities are incredible powerful things, both commercially and socially. Building them is important and ultimately very valuable work.

Amen! We're excited to see the dozens of online neighborhood forums that are bursting with activity on Front Porch Forum, and we look forward to expanding to more places in the near future. Check out our new web app.

One simple posting to Front Porch Forum and a dozen neighbors materialized. Wielding snow blowers and shovels, they blasted a path so my wife could begin her journey to the hospital. Her arrival sparked our little boy's turnaround, and now, gratefully, he's home and doing well.

So is this one heartwarming tale important? Well, I can tell you that the news of a neighborhood kid being hospitalized and his mother being kept from him by the big blizzard got top billing that day in our area. Not only did neighbors talk about this story (I'm still asked about it months later), most amazingly, about 2 percent of the neighborhood actually dropped what they were doing as soon as they heard, suited up, and headed out the door to pitch in.

Going local

"Local" is hot in the online universe (or "hyper-local," whatever that means!) -- and for good reason. My neighbors-to-the-rescue story is one of hundreds that we've seen on Front Porch Forum. Thousands more emanate from local blogs, mailing lists, neighborhood websites, and other town-specific Internet outposts. Millions more await the arrival of a successful local online platform.

My wife and I launched Front Porch Forum in 2006 across our metro region after running a precursor for just our own Burlington, Vt., neighborhood for six years. Now, as a 2010 Knight News Challenge award winner, we're rebuilding our platform to incorporate lessons learned, and expanding to new regions.

Over the past decade, I've learned from hundreds of local sites. Some, like Craigslist, have taken over a whole sector, while others, like Backfence.com, informed many, but ultimately failed. To make sense of this growing body of experience, I've examined local sites along dozens of dimensions.

Is Walmart local?

Many tech blogs spin themselves dizzy over the likes of GroupOn, FourSquare, LivingSocial, Patch, etc. They focus on the giant well-funded dot-coms that are national or global in reach. But how can something be "local" when it's coming from far away? As Baristanet's Debra Galant said recently to StreetFight, "Patch certainly rubs all of the independents the wrong way. Patch is part of AOL. (It is) like Walmart coming into main street."

Increasingly, major companies like GroupOn and Patch are employing local sales and content staff in each area where they operate. This stands in stark contrast to the all-algorithm/no-people Google-type model. At the same time, it's more efficient than the traditional newspaper model. For example, Front Porch Forum reaches more households in Burlington than the local Gannett daily, and we employ three compared with its 300.

Aggregators vs. originators: What about the audience?

Several recent commentators divide local into two camps: aggregators and originators. Topix and AmericanTowns are two aggregators, while Datasphere is a network of originators. LocalWiki (another Knight News Challenge award winner) and iBrattleboro are examples of originators, too.

However, this view misses a crucial third source of content ... the locals! When you're talking about a story of interest to only several hundred nearby neighbors, then the community's contribution to the story is crucial. Many aggregators and originators have space for user comments, while other successful sites put the community first, ahead of the stories. For example, Front Porch Forum postings from our neighbors are picked up by local journalists and bloggers every week and spun into traditional news stories.

Who's creating the core content on these local sites: professionals, a few amateurs, or the crowd? Newspaper sites use professional journalists, one-off hyper-local bloggers often have one or more regular amateurs, and other sites, such as Front Porch Forum, get the content from the crowd. We found that half of one town subscribed to Front Porch Forum and an amazing three-quarters of them had posted ... the crowd speaks!

What about community conversation?

A growing list of services offer data aggregated by location, e.g., the innovative Everyblock (and fellow Knight News Challenge award winner). Other sites focus on reporting. Increasingly, these services are coming to realize the value of empowering community-level conversations among neighbors. Witness Everyblock's recent major upgrade to bring social into its mix.

Local secret sauce

So that's a taste of a few of the critical ingredients to consider when perusing the local online menu. In our decade of local online cooking, we've refined our secret sauce to make Front Porch Forum wildly successful in our pilot region. Half of Burlington subscribes to their neighborhood forums. Even more amazing, more than half of those members actively contribute. Most importantly, neighbor-helping-neighbor stories flow through Front Porch Forum daily, just like the one about the shovel-wielding neighbors who sent my wife on her way to the hospital.

These are but a few of the issues with which to grapple. Others include anonymity vs. pseudo-anonymity vs. real identities, scale, mobile, and lots more. We're currently hosting 150 online neighborhood forums, and our team learns something new every day. Local online is heating up! Stay tuned.

Along the same lines, Sarah Byrnes wrote in YES! Magazine that "In the past, neighbors knew each other and engaged more naturally in mutual aid, sharing common resources and helping those in need. Nowadays, our mutual aid muscles are out of shape and pretty flabby."

The National Conference on Citizenship's Civic Health Index has attempted to bring science into the discussion by measuring things like the percent of people in a place who discuss politics with family and friends (44 percent in Vermont, for example). They found that 9 percent of Americans work with neighbors to improve the community, and 16 percent exchange favors with neighbors a few times a week.

Local Sites Drive Engagement

In their new book, The Abundant Community: Awakening the Power of Families and Neighborhoods, John McKnight and Peter Block provide strategy and tactics culled from decades of community organizing. The book is chock full of hands-on, face-to-face ideas for pulling neighbors together. The Internet gets a mention, but it should get more.

A recent study out of the U.K. by Hugh Flouch and Kevin Harris found incredible civic engagement impact from neighborhood-focused websites. Among the findings reported by residents who use these websites:

95 percent feel more informed about the neighborhood
92 percent feel useful information gets shared efficiently
82 percent feel people pull together to improve the neighborhood
69 percent feel an increased sense of belonging within the neighborhood

How is this possible? I'm guessing that the sites studied offer highly relevant (that is, very local) content, don't waste people's time, and emphasize relationships and communication among "participants" over simply feeding news to passive "readers." These sites likely move away from social media's 90:9:1 principal, which says 90 percent of visitors are lurkers, 9 percent pitch in a little, and 1 percent create the vast majority of a site's content.

Sometimes even the 1 percent of the content that appears to be user-generated is actually supplied by paid contributors, such as the recent case with Yell.

Front Porch Forum

I see a different pattern with our Knight News Challenge-supported Front Porch Forum. We host a pilot regional network of online neighborhood forums in Vermont with the simple mission of helping neighbors connect and get involved.

In one rural town, we found that half of the community had subscribed to FPF after one year and, remarkably, 66 percent had posted. Instead of 90:9:1, we saw a ratio closer to 34:44:22. In another study in Burlington, Vt., where half of the city subscribes to FPF, 90 percent reported that their local civic engagement had increased due to this online service.

Finding quality, timely and accessible local information is a daunting task in our current environment, with traditional media's convulsions and new media's fits and starts. But that's only half the battle. An informed yet isolated and disconnected populace does not make a democracy. We need more efforts like those covered in the U.K. study above that get people connected to neighbors and involved in the places where they live.

That's our mission at Front Porch Forum and we're excited to find growing interest in turning online words into offline local actions. Please share examples in the comments.

My name is Michael Wood-Lewis, and my wife, Valerie, and I saw an opportunity four years ago and created Front Porch Forum (FPF) to serve our home region in northwest Vermont. Amazingly, nearly half of the state's largest city now subscribes to FPF. The sense of community here is thriving and winning national recognition, including a 2010 Knight News Challenge award. You can learn a bit more about us in this video:

Knight News Challenge: Front Porch Forum from Knight Foundation on Vimeo.

Creating Real Neighbors

It's astounding what a couple minutes per day of neighborhood news and chatter in a person's inbox can do. People tell me that they lived on their street for years not knowing a soul. Now, since Front Porch Forum kicked in, those familiar strangers have become real neighbors.

Each neighborhood has its own online space and the whole region is blanketed with a network of more than 100 neighborhood forums. People post about lost pets, block parties, car break-ins, plumber recommendations, helping ailing neighbors, local politics, school plays and much more. All ages partake, from seniors in their 80s seeking community support to stay in their homes to teenagers looking for summer jobs.

In one rural area, people used FPF to find a pair of spooked horses who jumped their fence, then pitched in to build a better enclosure as a gift to the owners. In an urban neighborhood, residents rallied around a mother who was assaulted in the park, and eventually got the city to improve safety conditions there. And in a different community, a young family asked for a couple volunteers to help move their household into new digs across the street -- 36 neighbors showed up! Not only was the job done quickly, but now this family knows three dozen people in the surrounding blocks.

"This small family business turns the Internet on its head," says FPF member and University of Vermont associate dean Susan A. Comerford. "The web offers countless ways to waste time, but Front Porch Forum actually pushes people offline and onto the sidewalks to chat with neighbors, face to face."

And that leads people to get more involved in their communities, as the chat evolves into action. An incredible nine out of ten FPF members report becoming more involved in local issues due to this free service.

"Front Porch Forum is a post-modern return to citizen democracy," says Comerford. "This may well be the most important advance in community development strategies in decades."

The Knight News Challenge award will allow us to rebuild FPF's current proof-of-concept software to better provide for our subscribers. We'll then expand to all 251 towns in Vermont, and prepare to offer Front Porch Forum to communities outside of Vermont in 2011.

I look forward to reporting on our progress here on Idea Lab, and I hope to hear from readers in the comments below or via FPF's website.