Wahoo! I know, I know – we’re a bit behind the times with this. Better late than never, though. I am pleased to announce that here at Localmouth we now have our own Facebook page. Yay!

If you like the idea of helping local people connect more (and I know you do!) then please show your support by ‘Liking’ the Localmouth Facebook page now.

(P.S. We did have a kind of presence on Facebook before, but it was never quite the right sort. Now it is!)

photo credit: Ryan Polei | www.ryanpolei.com

There’s some interesting discussion in the comments, too.

It’s great to see a round-up of this information. There’s a lot to learn from what’s happened so far and from the various efforts that are currently under way and I’d love to see more articles attempt to bring it all together like this to extract some lessons. Keith promises a follow-up post on the future of hyperlocal. Will it involve Localmouth? One to look forward to.

photo credit: Pingu1963

Right — time to get stuck in and earn that fifth star!

photo credit: Digital Sextant

William makes a good point about ‘following your customer’ and choosing a platform based on what people are already using and familiar with. Given Facebook’s incredible popularity, it’s definitely a tool to consider.

6 Reasons to use Facebook for Local Community Networking

• Facebook has a huge membership (now over 14 million user accounts in the UK alone)
• Lots of members use it very regularly
• Facebook makes it easy for members to spread the word about your site to their friends living nearby
• 78% of users are aged 16-35, so it could be a good choice if you’re particularly interested in reaching that group
• It’s free to use
• It’s very easy to set up your own group

Potential Downsides in using Facebook for Local Community Networking

• Your group may be perceived as ‘for young people only’
• People who are not already using Facebook may have been put off from doing so by privacy concerns
• It might be hard to get people to sign up to Facebook just to join your local community group
• The options for customising the look and functionality of your group are quite limited

There are plenty of free tools around these days that make it relatively easy to set up a website for your local community. Here’s a round-up of some of the most popular.

1. Wordpress – one of the world’s most popular blogging platforms. You can use a Wordpress blog to share articles and news about your local community (a bit like an online parish magazine). You can also set up static pages with reference information about the area, e.g. a list of local clubs. Similar alternatives: Blogger.
2. Ning – this social networking platform lets you set up a mini Facebook for your local area. If that conjures up horrific images, try looking at HarringayOnline for a site that’s using this well.
3. phpBB – “the world’s most widely-used open source forum solution”. A discussion forum lets local people talk amongst each other and can bring a site to life. It’s a bit more complicated to set up as it needs to be installed on your web server, but many web hosts can help you install phpBB forums for free. Similar alternatives: Simple Machines Forum.
4. Yahoo Groups – a really simple tool letting you create an email list for your neighbourhood. Members can send messages to the group and specify how often they want to receive group emails. Yahoo Groups also lets you share photos and files. Similar alternatives: Google Groups.
5. Joomla – the most advanced of the five. This is a fully-fledged, open source ‘content management system‘ (CMS) with all sorts of options and extra add-ons that you can download. You will need some space on a web server and should be prepared to spend plenty of time learning how it all works. If you want lots of flexibility, though, and are technically-minded, this could be an option to explore. Similar alternatives: Drupal.

What does your favourite local community website run on?

Photo by robbyt.

[Inidentally, there's been some good discussion on the topic lately by William Perrin, Kevin Harris and David Wilcox, who are all worth following if you're interested in this kind of thing.]

Personally, I think there’s great potential for simple online tools to bring local communities more closely together. It may be a struggle at the start to get together a critical mass of neighbours, and it may need a liberal dash of coaxing, but once you’ve got the ball rolling, people’s natural desire to communicate with others should take care of the rest. Good stuff will happen. ‘Good’ won’t always mean that people get along well or that arguments won’t take place. Far from it. When people are talking about stuff that matters, conversations are bound to get heated at times, and that’s where the delicate job of moderation comes in. But generally, I think, more communication between local people can be a very positive thing.

People have been experimenting with lots of different approaches to local community websites. Some started a number of years ago, others are much more recent. Some are blog based, some are static, others still are like mini versions of Facebook. Whatever the choices people have made so far, it’s clear that it’s becoming easier and easier for even the less-technically-inclined to set up an effective hub for their chosen local area.

Anyway, without further ado, here’s a round-up of 10 (nearly all UK-based) local community websites that I think are doing a great job and are really interesting for different reasons:

1. Front Porch Forum – a U.S. site started in 2000 and now with over 11,000 households on board. Based in the leafy Five Sisters suburb of Burlington, Vermont (but now covering a wider area), each neighbourhood of 200 or so houses has its own private forum (based on proprietary software, as far as I can tell) that works like a moderated email list. Residents’ messages include their full, real names, email addresses and streets (although not house numbers). According to the site, an impressive 90% of all households in its pilot area are signed up. Front Porch Forum is free to residents and makes some money by through sponsorship and charging local council departments to use its network to communicate with residents. [Michael Wood-Lewis, the site's founder, also writes a fascinating blog at Ghost of Midnight.]
2. Harringay Online – a not-for-profit Ning-based social network launched in July 2007 for the residents of Harringay in London. It has grown rapidly and now has well over 600 nearly 1100 members participating in some vibrant discussions about their local area.
3. London-SE1 – loads of local news as well as a thorough guide to the local area, this site is more journalistic than others on the list. It’s been running for 10 years now and makes money through ads and affiliates. The site owners also run a weekly email newsletter for the same area.
4. Kings Cross Environment – this free, not-for-profit, blog-based site provides news, views, events and grumbles about London’s Kings Cross area. It features articles contributed by a handful of local volunteer authors and seems to have plenty of fresh content.
5. ChiswickW4 – quite a general site about Chiswick in West London, providing a discussion forum, business directory, local news and events calendar. The discussion forum, in particular, seems to be thriving (100 messages on the day I checked). It’s advertising-funded and publishes a weekly e-mail newsletter which, according to the site, has a distribution of over 10,900. It’s one of eight sites based on the same template and covering other neighbouring areas of London.
6. Virtual Norwood – a long-running site (started in 1998) that brings together a moderated forum, an unmoderated email list and a local wiki. The site claims over 20,000 visitors per month.
7. Richmond Online – a non-profit, news-based site that collects stories about the area from a variety of publications. Snippets of articles are provided, along with links back to their sources for the full stories. The site is one of a network of four sites covering nearby areas of south-west London.
8. Caithness Online – to the other end of the country for this ad-supported site. Perhaps slightly unfair to call Caithness a ‘neighbourhood’, but some great local info and popular forums prove that you don’t have to live in a big city to run a great community website.
9. Cranleigh Village Community Website – what I love about this site is its simplicity. It’s incredibly clear and easy to use. Great for a small community.
10. Aldbourne Community Website – another village website. Aldbourne have put together a particularly good local events listing and a well-used forum.

Inevitably there will be plenty of great sites that I’ve missed.

I’d love to hear about more good examples, so do tell me and I may put together a follow-up list.

Photo by dominicspics

• Sarah appealing for any information on tortoises stolen from her parents’ home in Cosham, Portsmouth
• Hamish looking for witnesses to a car park rage incident in Bournemouth
• Eveline tracing her family tree who has questions about her great great grandfather, Thomas Kington who lived in Little Common

It’s great to see people using Localmouth for all this. Hopefully local people will be able to help Sarah, Hamish and Eveline with what they’re each looking for.

photo credit: riddle_

Here are a few changes I’ve made in an effort to improve Localmouth’s accessibility.

I’m not an expert on this stuff, so if there’s something you’ve spotted that’s still really annoying, difficult to use or just plain needs improving, do please let me know. Thanks!

• Changed logo alt text to say simply ‘Localmouth’
• Set alt text for navigation decoration images to blank
• Set alt text for search button to ’search’
• Provided a link from the limerick map to a text-based alternative list of limericks
• Set alt text for other decorative images to blank
• Tweaked a few bits and pieces to fix XHTML and CSS validity

I found the following resources were very handy:

• Checklist of checkpoints for web content accessibility guidelines
• WebAIM’s ‘appropriate use of alternative text

Plus, of course,

• W3C HTML Markup Validator
• W3C CSS Validator

If you happen to be thinking of reviewing your own website’s accessibility, but just keep putting it off, I highly recommend you look into it (the checklist mentioned above is a good starting point). It may surprise you how easy it is to make the necessary changes.

Over the last couple of days I updated the design of the site, neatening-up the alignment in places, tweaking the colour scheme and hopefully making it all a little more pleasing to the eye. It could still be a lot better, I’m sure. Let me know if you’re a web design wizard and reckon you could work some magic!