Are hyper-local online communities the wave of the future? Many location-based apps (think Foursquare or Gowalla or Yelp) have caught on quickly, and Facebook and Twitter will likely add the option to make updates location-aware.  In response, some in the Web 2.0 world are shifting away from making products that create national or international communities. Instead, they’re looking at the local level and hope to conquer the world city by city, even neighborhood by neighborhood.

These relative newcomers were likely inspired by pioneering, local online community makers such as Topix. Founded in 2002, Topix is – as their About Us page says – “the leading news community on the Web, connecting people to the information and discussions that matter to them in every U.S. town and city.” It aggregates news from thousands of sources across the web and delivers content based on your chosen zip code (there’s an international audience as well of course).

But beyond posting news stories, Topix encourages its users to comment and report on stories going on in their own neighborhood. Due to this focus on community, Topix receives over 30,000 comments a day, most of which are focused on the local level.

Topix CEO Chris Tolles was gracious enough to answer a few of our questions about local online communities, user generated content, and the future of the newspaper industry (including what he thinks of Rupert Murdoch’s threat to pull News Corp. content off of Google News). Chris will also be speaking at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco this May, so be sure to register later this week!

Without further ado, another Web 2.0 Expo Speaker Interview:

Kaitlin: In a recent Topix blog post, you noted that “Topix has gone from being merely an aggregator of local news, to becoming the home of local voice on the web”. You base this on the fact that 60% of articles on Topix are original, user generated news stories, and 75% of pageviews on Topix are on the commentary.

First of all, how did you get there? What specifically makes Topix different from any other site that can throw up a comment board and host “a community”?

Chris: It’s that we have created this commentary around locality. We have 30,000 forums around specific US cities and towns. Also, we have reached critical mass with over 90,000,000 comments across millions of different threads. We created this initially as an adjunct to the news we aggregated. Now, it has really turned into the main focus of the site, especially in areas with poor news coverage.

Kaitlin: While browsing Reddit the other day, I came across this and got a good chuckle out of it. The top comment however, made me cringe a little for all the sites out there that base their models on user-generated content: “chess_the_cat: Web 2.0: You create the content; we keep the cash.”

Do you think community-based sites owe their users anything? If not money, what tangible benefits do community members/contributors receive from Topix or any community site? Is that better than money?

Chris: Well, as I mentioned before, we have provided communities with a forum to discuss what matters most to them – and this is often in lieu of a local newspaper. There is a lot of utility for our users to be able to find out what’s going on in their towns and be able to put their opinion up and join the conversation. What we owe our users is to provide a free and open place to talk about what they want.

Kaitlin: Is it possible for the Web to be supersaturated with community-based models? Are you seeing evidence of that in any particular vertical?

Chris: Well, it is much more effective to be unique— we tend to have very strong community around local, and partially it is because no one else has local message boards for every town in the US with the kind of usage we have. Also, we have a set of other message boards which have attracted interested folks from around the net. I think you will find that over the next ten years, billions of people are going to come onto the web and learn to contribute their opinion and stories to the mix. So, no I don’t think we are anywhere near supersaturated as a whole. Now, I think there are areas which have leaders with market power—classifieds in the Bay Area is going to be a Craigslist party for the foreseeable future and restaurant listings in SF are likely to be from Yelp. But there are a lot of places with growth potential

Kaitlin: Are communities targeted by location the wave of the future, so to speak? What examples of this are you seeing? What’s the potential for growth?

Chris: Clearly, communities tied together by who you know have done very well over the past five years with the rise of social networks. Communities of interest have been with us as long as there has been an Internet with Usenet, AOl et al. Location starts making sense as the basis of online community once everyone in your neighborhood is online and can be addressed there. As we have reached a point where over half the US population is on broadband, I think location and local are going to be two very large areas for growth in online community over the next several years – and the growth here at Topix, as well as the excitement around Yelp, Foursquare, Gowalla and the like are indications of this.

Kaitlin: Let’s talk about the newspaper industry. Not long ago, people scoffed at Rupert Murdoch’s threat that he’d block Google and other sites from crawling News Corp. content. Some said he was just a Luddite and didn’t “get” how the Web worked. Now it seems he may have a stronger hand than any of us thought. (Here’s a great article summarizing the situation.)

As the CEO of a site that aggregates news from a variety of sources, is this keeping you awake at night? Are you worried the newspaper industry could form a syndicate wherein all papers agree to enforce a paid model?

Chris: We have had more than 10,000 media sites ask to be part of our crawl, and very few ask to be pulled out. We also syndicate our feed to large sites like ESPN, CNN and AOL. Those syndications deals seem to be of real value to local news sites, so I’m not too worried about this kind of thing at the moment.
Also, we’ve really got more traffic coming in directly to our local forums, so this is a lot less of a worry than it would have been several years ago.

Kaitlin: If newspapers start to block you from using their content (or sue you even), what does that mean for Topix? Can you continue to operate relying on “citizen journalism” ? By that I mean user generated news stories or independent blogs even.

Chris: We will certainly try and work with publishers to make sure we are making inclusion into Topix useful. Remember, the three largest newspaper co’s are investors in our company, so I’m really not worried about this as a likely scenario. But as I mentioned above, we are really focused on the local communities we have built up and it is likely that we are beyond the point of being beholden to the folks we aggregate from a traffic standpoint. That said, we try and maintain good relationships with publishers and provide value through traffic and syndication. I think we enjoy a very different role in the minds of publishers.
Newspapers source stories from our forums all the time, as well.

Kaitlin: What’s the future of citizen journalism in a world with a rebounded journalism industry? If Murdoch’s model succeeds, and journalists are once again in demand, what incentive does anyone have to report on news for free?

Chris: People have a fundamental need to be heard and contribute. The Internet enables, for the first time, this to happen easily and inexpensively more or less universally. We are not a replacement for the newspaper or the professional journalist, or for that matter the dedicated blogger. We give the average citizen the ability to contribute in a place with worldwide distribution immediately. I don’t believe journalism needs to fail for us to be successful, nor do I believe that we are going to return to a world where we let journalists have a monopoly on telling the story. That dog had its day.

~~

Kaitlin Pike is the Community Manager for Web 2.0 Expo. She can be reached @w2e or @kcpike.

Trackback URI | Comments RSS