4grabs: World-wide, location based, user contributed publishing medium.
Requested amount from Knight News Challenge:
$300,000Total cost of project including all sources of funding:
$650,000Expected amount of time to complete project:
Phase 1 [specification/coding] complete. Phase 2 [launch] complete. Phase 3 [marketing/adoption] beginningOur project is to develop, launch and market a world-wide, location based, user contributed Web2.0 publishing medium.
4grabs.org is a novel way people can find neighborhood news anywhere by proximity, whether they want to center their search in Boston MA, the rural areas surrounding Rockford, IL or Kenya Africa. 4grabs lets you center your search right in the middle of your own neighborhood.
At 4grabs you can freely post and search for jobs and people looking for work, neighborhood news and alerts, discussions about political and cultural issues that affect your community, items for sale or freely shared with your neighbors or let people know who makes the best burritos on the block.
...information for the people, by the people.
There's an obvious underlying credo here about localization, recycling, micro-economics and saving gas. When you find solutions according to proximity -- the nearest resource, job, worker or bicycle -- you obviously don't have to drive as far to get what you want as you would when searching on some of the other regionally-based sites.
It's created to be freely accessible to anyone with a computer or PDA. We are dedicated to helping you conduct efficient, location-centric searches and believe it is a technology that not only saves you time, but builds community while helping us all reduce waste in our lives.
0 commentsHow will your project improve the way news and information are delivered to geographic communities?
How 4grabs improves the way news and information is delivered to geographic communities.
The predicament, defining geographic communities.
This is a big mistake. You'll never get it right. Geographic boundaries that delineate communities and neighborhoods change daily. By defining them you are setting the stage for discrimination. Your users are either in or they are out. What about people who live on one of boarders of your geographically defined neighborhood?
This mistake is constantly being made by almost everyone developing a web2.0 solution to provide local news.
Take Craigslist for instance. As successful as CL is, it only works in 500 cities in the world. If you're in one of those cities great, if you're not you can click on a link to ask if they will add your city to Craigslist.
This week, there were 630 requests to have "my city" added to Craigslist. "please add Sunshine Coast","please add Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri","please add Angeles City, Philippines. And this is not an easy addition when your site has defined the database with geographic boundaries.
There are an estimated 425 million cities in the world. Multiply that by the number of communities/neighborhoods in any city and see if your calculator can handle it, much less your database. Then think about how you will define and service the rural areas!
So how does 4grabs improve on the way it's being done?
No Geographic Boundaries
0 commentsHow is your idea innovative? (New or different from what already exists.)
How 4grabs is innovative and different.
No Geographic Boundaries:
At the core of the 4grabs publishing medium is a powerful search engine that searches postings by their location on the surface of the earth and returns the closest posts to your search location. So you can search in your neighborhood, across town, or in another city or country for that matter.
What constitutes a 'neighborhood' is different depending on where you are. If you live in a media rich east side suburb of Baltimore, your neighborhood may be a matter of blocks. If you live on a rural American farm, your neighborhood could be 20 square miles.
What people want to see is "show me" news, resources, jobs, and people looking for work and order them by relevance. 4grabs orders search results by relevance in 2 ways:
By distance - When you're looking for news, something to buy, a job or somebody to work for/with you, then sorting by distance is the greenest approach. You want to hire someone close to the job, people want to work closest to their homes. As distance increases, news as it pertains to your community looses value.
By date - As the data density increases around your location you may choose to view the results of your search my modified date. This way you can always see what's new in your community.
No Software to install, configure and operate: 4grabs is not a package to install, configure and operate. There are no servers to buy and setup, and no co-location services to rent or lease. 4grabs.org works in your community today, no matter where it is located. Everywhere in the world.
All you need to do is start posting "your" newsworthy items that you want to share with your neighbors.
0 commentsWhat experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?
Experience and the experiance.
We have posted this project to help others contemplating digitally base community projects.
The easiest way to answer the question "What experience do you or your organization have to successfully develop this project?" is it's done already.
However, develop and launch is not the end of the challenge, it's just the beginning.
The real challenge is;
- you have a solid method to deliver information and news using digital media
- you've put your development funding to good use and made it to launch day
- How do you market the value of digital neighborhood news to the community?
- How do you achieve critical mass and adoption, especially in a print media dominated society?
- Can you expect the printed media establishments to welcome your digital solution with open arms?
- Will they view your solution as competition?
- What alternative marketing strategies are available to you outside of the printed world?
- How do you begin to transform a user based society where there are journalists, editors and readers into a contribution based society where the readers are the journalists and editors.
And the really big one...
This is the complete challenge: develop, launch and adopt.
Hopefully, the Knight Foundation recognizes the whole challenge and will offer their wisdom and guidance to all.
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