This is the last in a series of 29 ways to help your local community online in 2010. If you missed it, you may wish to read the introductory post.

In this post, I suggest that organizing events out is a great way to help strengthen your community while you’re online. This series has included recent posts about spreading the news, displaying a local-pride bumper sticker, and sharing the link love.

This series has dealt with improving your local (that is, geographically limited and physical) community through what you do online. I’m concluding with the suggestion that you complete the cycle by taking what’s online and pulling it back off-line again.

Meeting people face-to-face matters, as we all know. The beautiful thing about social media is that they make it easy to meet people online and then take it deeper by connecting with them in real life.

On Facebook, create an event and invite people to it. On Twitter, poll people’s interest and then create a Tweetup. Here in Lancaster we use the hashtag #lancup to make it easy to follow discussions about meetups organized through Twitter. In some cases, even more powerful is Meetup.com, which allows you to create and publicize regularly-scheduled gatherings structured around common interests like hobbies, careers, and books.

For bonus points, make your event a fundraiser. It’s not hard to find a cause that aligns with the interests and passions of the group of people attending your event, and since there’s no need to make a profit off the event, set the price so that there’s a margin that can benefit that cause.

And with that resolution for 2010, the series is wrapped up. Thank you for your participation and interest all throughout this month!

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This is the twenty-eighth in a series of 29 ways to help your local community online in 2010. If you missed it, you may wish to read the introductory post.

In this post, I suggest that sharing news relevant to other members of your local community is a great way to help strengthen your community while you’re online. This series has included recent posts about displaying a local-pride bumper sticker, sharing the link love, and inspiring others to buy local.

Today, I’d like to go a step further with that analogy.

We humans love news. All the current talk about “the future of journalism” and “the role of today’s journalist” focus on journalism to the exclusion of news. When the news is truly news, we can’t get enough of it. “What’s new?” and “What’s happening?” are our ever-pertinent questions for visitors and for friends we haven’t seen in a while.

We’re growing intolerant of fluff

When you produce a daily newspaper or a daily television news show, you have space or airtime to fill. It’s a similar amount of space to fill whether a lot is going on or not much is going on. It’s exactly the same amount of airtime to fill. If there isn’t enough real news to fill it, fluff gets brought in by the truckload.

As a result, fewer and fewer people read the local newspaper or watch the local news show every day. I can’t blame them, can you?

The downside to this trend of tuning out the news is obvious: While people are avoiding mountains of brain-numbing fluff, they’re also missing out on the rare bits of really important news.

Help others identify the real news

The good news is that the solution/opportunity is equally obvious: When you know something’s important, bring it to other people’s attention.

It’s like sitting around the cracker barrel. If you think something is newsworthy, you’ll bring it up. If others agree that it’s interesting or important, they’ll talk about it. If not, it will get dropped. The so-called “wisdom of crowds” is well suited for separating the wheat from the chaff in terms of what’s news.

The real advantage of what we have today over the cracker barrel of days gone by is that we do have access to journalism, and good journalism. If I tweet something that begins with “I heard that…,” other people can fact-check me easily. Most of the time, I can include a link directly to an article that has the key facts.

It’s the best of both worlds. Real people get to identify the news, and journalists get to make the conversations better-informed instead of just the swapping of gossip and rumor.

So today, resolve to spread the news—the real news—online this year.

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This is the twenty-seventh in a series of 29 ways to help your local community online in 2010. If you missed it, you may wish to read the introductory post.

In this post, I suggest that listening and conversing online is a great way to help strengthen your community from behind the comfort of your keyboard. This series has included recent posts about creating a Google map tour, displaying a local-pride bumper sticker, and sharing the link love.

Frankly, it surprises me, too. I outlined all twenty-nine resolutions before I announced the series, and each day I have chosen the one I most feel like writing about. There have been so many cool tools and shiny toys, so many theories and ideas, that kept me from this fundamental resolution until today.

Today’s resolution goes like this: Listen to other members of your community online. And talk to them.

That’s it. Today’s resolution is conversation.

Broadcasting isn’t enough

As many, many others have said, online media are not one-way. They’re not even two-way. Communication online is many-to-many, the first time in human history we’ve had the ability for the masses to talk to the masses.

Good social media consultants advise their clients to begin by listening. But that doesn’t just go for businesses. It goes for citizens as well.

To me, the greatest power of a medium like Twitter is its ability to serve as a finely-tuned ear to the ground. It’s like sitting around a dozen proverbial cracker barrels throughout your town. You can catch up on what’s happening and what’s on people’s minds, just by overhearing.

If you really care about your local community and want to make it better, that means you care about the people in your community and want the best for them. The most fundamental way of caring for (indeed of loving) other people is by hearing them and seeing them. You can’t love what you don’t know. To put it the opposite way, to know is to love.

So get online and pay attention.

Passively listening isn’t enough

And yet, care and concern without action is inadequate. It’s vital to precede action with listening, because otherwise all you’re doing is imposing your own plans and ideas on others. It is just as vital, though, to follow listening with action.

Many times, responding with words is action enough. Many of you reading this have more than once given me the gift of encouragement, of laughter, of sympathy, of imagination, and of appreciation through what you have said to me online—here in the comments on my blog, on Facebook, on Twitter, by instant message, and through e-mail.

If you hear that I’m struggling because I’m overwhelmed with housework, sure, you could come over and do laundry for me. In addition to being highly unlikely, it is often unnecessary. Encouraging me to take it one step at a time, to put less pressure on myself, or to find something to laugh about may be enough to get me through.

Another example of responding to people online is to answer when someone asks for feedback. Twitter and Facebook are packed with people who live in our area asking what you think of their latest idea, requesting help with a computer problem, and seeking recommendations of where to look for a specific product. Answering them is helping members of your community. Helping members of your community is serving your community, whether you’re doing so online or off.

When the Web first took hold, we thought its potential was in its ability to eliminate vast distances of geography. New York could now stay in touch with Syndney, Shanghai, and Moscow constantly, in real time. It turns out that we under-appreciated the Internet’s ability to eliminate (in some senses) much smaller distances of geography. With most of us in an office all day, it has become a chore to keep up with the community outside. The conversations the Internet allows are making that a lot easier. All we have to do is listen to one another and, when appropriate, respond.

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This is the twenty-sixth in a series of 29 ways to help your local community online in 2010. If you missed it, you may wish to read the introductory post.

In this post, I suggest that making online maps of sights to see is a great way to help strengthen your community while you’re online. This series has included recent posts about displaying a local-pride bumper sticker, sharing the link love, and inspiring others to buy local.

That’s especially true in the city, where you can wander on foot, and it’s also true for the rest of the county, where you need a car, bike, or horse and buggy.

When you wanderings have led you to many good (and under-discovered) places, why not collect those place on a map and share them with others?

Map it out

That’s what Jen Siegrist did a year ago with her Google map Lancaster City – Things To Do. It’s a great little map because she took the time to annotate the points of interest, even if some of the information has become a little outdated.

One of my favorite examples of such Google maps is the Richmond (VA) Tacky Lights Tour. An example from the realm of business would be Paul Stoltzfus’s map of show lawns from his Lancaster lawn care service, WiseGrass.

So, today’s resolution for making your local community better through online means is to make a Google map of great places to visit.

It’s simple. Go to Google Maps, log in with your Gmail account, and then look for the “My Maps” link below the search bar and to the left. Click it, then click “Create map.” Give it a name and description and you’re off and running. Use the pushpins to add points of interest and the lines to draw routes. You can even invite others to add to the map by clicking “collaborators.”

To make it easier, just search the name of each location you want to add. In the information box that pops up, click “Save to My Maps,” and you’ll be adding points of interest in no time.

The possibilities are endless

I’m sure you can do this with other mapping/direction sites as well, and feel free to let us know about them in the comments. Also please share links to any maps you’ve already created.

The more I think about it, the more possibilities there are here. Maybe next month we can do a collaborative map, “A Locals’ Guide to Lancaster,” for tourists who don’t want to be touristy. Would you be interested in that?

When it comes to making valuable local content online, the more geo-relevant it is, the better. That’s why earlier in this series I wrote about adding Lancaster to the FourSquare map (FourSquare is an application for GPS-enabled mobile devices). I think that making specialized Google maps as guides has a really valuable place, too.

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This is the twenty-second in a series of 29 ways to help your local community online in 2010. If you missed it, you may wish to read the introductory post.

In this post, I suggest that leaving comments on local blogs is a great way to help strengthen your community while you’re online. This series has included recent posts about leaving comments on local blogs, reviewing local restaurants and service providers, and shopping local on Etsy.

And yes, while the idea is so obvious as to be banal and the time it takes to say it is brief, it’s also powerful.

Make a list

If you read yesterday’s post, you saw that I ended it with a list of locally-oriented blogs that I recommend. I did the same thing when I wrote earlier in this series about becoming a fan of local Facebook pages.

Those posts got attention and comments. When you’re introducing an idea to others, it’s helpful to break it down, to give examples, and to suggest where to start. The list, that amazing little invention of formatting, is perfectly suited for such tasks.

I’ll also share that the list of Lancaster Twitter users on this site is the most popular piece of content on here. It continues to receive views every day, even when it’s been too long since I’ve updated it (like right now).

There are all kinds of lists

Lists of local things are great ways of giving a shoutout to places and people you like, and they also provide quick value to others in your community.

So today’s resolution for making our local community better through online activities is to write and share lists this year.

You can make a list of nearly anything, in a few styles, including:

Rankings – List, in order, your top ten local beers, sushi restaurants, parks, doctors, art galleries.

Comprehensive – Attempt to create an annotated list of everything. To keep it up-to-date and authoritative, ask others to let you know of additions and corrections.

Examples – Most of the time, it’s ridiculous to expect yourself to have the time to create a comprehensive list, or even to rank items. A simple list of a few examples is still helpful. You can spotlight the ones you missed another time (and, I’ve learned, it’s also best to encourage people to add to the list by leaving a comment).

What comes to mind when you think of a list of things you’d like to share? Where do you already create lists? On Twitter? On your blog? On Amazon?

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This is the twenty-first in a series of 29 ways to help your local community online in 2010. If you missed it, you may wish to read the introductory post.

In this post, I suggest that leaving comments on local blogs is a great way to help strengthen your community while you’re online. This series has included recent posts about reviewing local restaurants and service providers,  shopping local on Etsy, and sharing certain photos.

Bloggers love them some comments

The post, by Alisa Bowman, mostly contained the usual warmed-over tips (bribe people, say something controversial, go off-topic, ask specific questions), but it was remarkable for her over-the-top description of how much bloggers love getting comments.

Bowman tells of her first post that “generated 23 comments. As the comments flowed in, I danced around my room saying, ‘Who-hoo. People really do read my blog. Who-ho. People love me.’ Let me tell you something. I. Did. Not. Want. To. Come. Down. From. That. 23 Comments. High.”

Yes, she described the sensation of getting blog comments as a “high.”

Preserving local assets

Learning that all it takes is comments to keep your community’s bloggers going is kind of like learning that all it takes is a few cups of water to keep your community’s park green.

Writing comments on blogs you already read is easy. And, by and large, comments are all it takes to preserve the local assets that bloggers are. If you offered me the choice between $50/week to blog or at least five comments on every entry I wrote, there would be no contest. It’s the comments that keep us inspired, on track, and ready to produce more.

Blog recommendations

If you’re not currently following any other Lancaster blog besides this one, here is a selection of what I read that are often specifically relevant to our geographic community and worth your time and attention (and comments!):

• SCORE Lancaster is the local chapter of the Service Corp of Retired Executives
• Matt Groff has a strong personality and good humor
• Brian Allain is almost always funny
• Lo-Fi Tribe is Shawn Anthony’s blog on a different sort of current-day Christianity
• Lancaster PA Real Estate Blog is Jeff Geoghan’s look at the county from a real estate agent’s perspective
• Lancaster from the Inn Side tells stories of tourists and a bed and breakfast
• The Traveling Food Critic is written by the Sunday News’s Lina Bierker
• Keystone Conservative covers Pennsylvania-wide politics but is edited locally by Ethan Demme
• Capitol Punmanship is also about local, state-wide, and national politics, by Tom Murse
• B.B. Bellezza tells of hand-made jewelry and crafts, by Kimberlie Burkhart
• Sara Bozich writes of things to do in the mid-state
• That’s What I Was Going To Say is Bryan Rutt’s blog on music
• The Mad African is Hiram Ring, musician and world traveler

Bloggers: Do you agree with me that you’d rather get comments than cash?

Readers: What other Lancaster blogs you recommend to others?

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This is the twentieth in a series of 29 ways to help your local community online in 2010. If you missed it, you may wish to read the introductory post.

In this post, I suggest that reviewing local restaurants and businesses is a great way to help strengthen your community while you’re online. This series has included recent posts about shopping local on Etsy, sharing certain photos, and staying in touch with your legislators.

If you want to be of service to others who visit or live in your community, tell them what’s good and what to avoid.

Resolve this year to review businesses, restaurants, and service providers online. This is different from my earlier suggested resolution of playing the critic, because while that was about helping others appreciate works of art, this is about sharing the positives and negatives of your experiences as a customer.

In order, here is my short list of places worth your time writing reviews:

Angie’s List
Businesses don’t pay to support Angie’s List; consumers do. That means that yes, you have to pay to write reviews. It also means that you get really high quality information. When it comes to contractors, service providers, and even health care providers, I’ve yet to find an online service that holds a candle to Angie’s List. By requiring a paid subscription, Angie’s List has not only solved the problem of a review site relying on money from the businesses being reviewed, it has also solved the problem of confirming the identity of reviewers while keeping their reviews anonymous.

Google Local
Around two-thirds of searches online take place on a Google property. Local results are becoming increasingly important, and when it comes to local results, the number of quality of reviews are a huge factor. I like Angie’s list for providers of services where a major expense is involved. I like Google reviews for most other businesses.

Yelp
Yelp is a place full of reviews on places to make everyday purchases–restaurants, bars, salons, boutique stores. It has a couple nice mobile apps.

Urban Spoon
When you need a restaurant idea, Urban Spoon is the place to turn. It’s more complete and accurate in major cities than it is on Lancaster restaurants, but I already see that changing.

I’ll also mention two other review services: CitySearch, which I don’t think much of, and ChowHound, which has selective, subjective, substantive reviews of dining but doesn’t aim to be comprehensive.

Business owners: Where would you most like to see your patrons leaving reviews?

Consumers: Where are your preferred places to share your experiences?

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This is the seventeenth in a series of 29 ways to help your local community online in 2010. If you missed it, you may wish to read the introductory post.

In this post, I suggest that connecting with staying connected with your government officials is a great way to help strengthen your community while you’re online. This series has included recent posts about connecting with people different from you, taking regular breaks from digital media, and commenting intelligently on local news sites.

• Find your federal elected legislators
• Find your Pennsylvania elected legislators

I could end this post right there. Simply finding out who represents you in government is a big step toward being a better citizen.

But to go a step further, social media are making it easier to connect with those elected officials.

For instance, here in Lancaster County, you can follow state reps Gordon Denlinger and Bryan Cutler on Twitter. Cutler has a Facebook page, too, as do State Senators Mike Brubaker and Lloyd Smucker. There’s a Mike Sturla fan club, also on Facebook.

All these local officials and their counterparts have official websites with contact information, including web forms and e-mail addresses.

So my resolution suggestion for today is: Resolve to take advantage of the ways the Internet makes it easier to follow and stay in touch with your elected officials.

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This is the sixteenth in a series of 29 ways to help your local community online in 2010. If you missed it, you may wish to read the introductory post.

In this post, I suggest that connecting with people different from you is a great way to help strengthen your community while you’re online. This series has included recent posts about taking regular breaks from digital media, commenting intelligently on local news sites, and appearing as a guest on local blogs and podcasts.

And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.”

On the day that we honor his life and legacy, I find myself in the middle of this blog series of how to better our community through what we each do online. And so I must ask what we can do online that will move us closer to allowing freedom to ring from Lancaster County.

Here is the resolution I propose: this year, make friends online with someone different from you. This person should live in the same physical/geographic community as you. If you’re white, befriend someone black or Latino. If you’re Gentile, befriend a Jew. If you’re Protestant, befriend a Catholic. If you’re straight, befriend someone gay. If you’re Christian, befriend someone Muslim. If you’re young, befriend someone old.

And converse with them online, at least a little bit.

The way I see it, it’s easier to meet new people online than face-to-face. You can scope them out and listen to what they’re saying before you introduce yourself. And when you do introduce yourself, it’s just about writing a few sentences and hitting “send.”

In other words, your comfort zone is much larger online than it is offline. Take advantage of that. Take greater risks in your friend-making online than you do offline.

Find someone with whom you have something in common. On Facebook, look through the lists of people who are fans of the same local businesses you are, who support the same local causes you do, who were invited to the same events you were. On Twitter, look at people who are listed in the same lists as you. Profile pictures make it easy to identify someone who doesn’t look like you. Profile information often makes it possible to find other differences.

Then send that person a message. Use that point of commonality as a starting point, and say straight up that you’re trying to meet new people.

If, as some people say, Facebook friends are a dime a dozen, why don’t those people have more diverse sets of friends?

I haven’t tried this new year’s resolution yet. But I’m excited to see whom I’ll meet.

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This is the fourteenth in a series of 29 ways to help your local community online in 2010. If you missed it, you may wish to read the introductory post.

In this post, I suggest that leaving intelligent comments in response to articles on local news sites is a great way to help others from behind the comfort of your keyboard. This series has included recent posts about appearing as a guest on local blogs and podcasts, bookmarking others’ content, and cataloging your community on FourSquare.

I’m not talking about church-goers. I’m talking about the haunters of the LancasterOnline TalkBack forums. Despite the fact that its editorial staff was downsized again this week (by ten people), the Sunday News is still the biggest and broadest news source in this county. And big news sites draw online wannabe pundits like moths to a flame.

On the TalkBack forums, community members hide behind pseudonyms, beat long-dead horses, and attack each other ad hominem with glee.

The forums are frequently unfriendly, irrational, and maddening. Reporters famously either hate or ignore them.

For all that the people behind the Lancaster Newspapers drone on wistfully about the importance of an independent press in our society (just listen to the pie-in-the-sky brainwashing that loops for pedestrians at the South Queen Street “Newseum” window display), they have done a preposterously inept job managing the sorry excuse for discourse taking place around the articles they publish online.

And yet, here I am, about to suggest you join them.

Yes, in 2010, consider walking into the lions den on occasion to say something intelligent.

Don’t get your hopes up: the TalkBack forums are broken beyond repair. Still, even though Lancaster Newspapers has gone to lengths to block their website’s traffic on information services like Quantcast (where this blog’s traffic is verified and available for all to see), we know that enough people visit the site to make it an important place for public input.

So that you don’t get pulled into the quicksand of the uglier sorts of conversations, I suggest following these three guidelines:

1. Speak your mind. Don’t react or respond to other posters. Instead, write with regard to the article itself, not any comments that may have already been left.

2. Don’t watch the replies like a hawk. Leave your comment then close the tab in your browser.

3. Point to intelligent resources like articles, blogs, and data sources. It will raise the level of discourse beyond conjecture, and break a hole in “the TalkBack forum bubble.”

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