Lisa Williams, Placeblogger, and the return of the Local Community

Photo by JD Lasica

Lisa Williams has extensive experience as a online community organizer and builder. Her current project, Placeblogger, support blogs about geographic communities. Through generosity and a light touch, she’s able to bring readers, funding, and a broader context of belonging to many communities at once.  And she’s damned thoughtful about how she approaches it.  Read on!  ~Sarah Dopp

Q: How would you explain Placeblogger to someone who’s never heard of it before?

Placeblogger is the largest searchable index of local weblogs.  If you want to know who’s blogging in Timbuktu, we’ve got ya covered.

Q: What’s your role in the project, and in the community?

I started the site in 2007 as a way to answer a simple question:  how many blogs really were doing journalism and online community for geographical communities?   At the time I started looking, in 2006, we found that 1 in 7 Americans lived in a community served by a placeblog.  Now it’s 1 in 2.  I don’t know of any other form of community media that’s had that kind of explosive growth.

One thing I’m not:  I’m not the pope of placeblogging, nor is Placeblogger the Vatican.  I’m really against efforts to “professionalize” any placebloggers who don’t want to do that.  Most placebloggers run their sites as a labor of love, and I think we have to respect the kind of authority that gives them to run their sites however they please.

There are three ways I want to help:  One, I started the Placeblogger Angel Fund to fund investigative reporting at grassroots news sites.   Two, I want to get placebloggers connected with each other.  Three, I want more people to find and participate in their local online communities.

Q: What do you love most about the community?

I love that placebloggers have dug underneath the bland, big-box chain retail surface that’s encrusted so much of the earth to the deep magic and humor that resides there, that is still under there, and will always be there.  Placebloggers get that communities are the ultimate inside joke.

Q: What makes the Placeblogger community stand out, to you? What makes it special?

In a strange way,  Placeblogger is an anti-community.  Over the years I’ve been running it,  I’ve had countless approaches from large media organizations, nonprofits, and entrepreneurs who wanted to enhance their own professional standing or make money off the thousands of people serving their local communities by writing blogs, ferreting out news, and being a local watercooler.   Some wanted placebloggers to abandon their own sites and write for theirs; others wanted to indoctrinate them into the values and standards of their own profession.  My least favorite of these were people who wanted to give placebloggers ethics training, as if somehow they were inherently untrustworthy.

Placeblogs don’t look like each other, and that’s good.  They don’t look like conventional news organizations, and that’s great.  What’s happening isn’t a community where shared values and practices are being passed back and forth — it’s a giant pool of simultaneous experiments aimed at figuring out how to save journalism and civic engagement for the next century.

Someday, the day will come when we have a professional organization and get together and have panel discussions.  But that day hasn’t come yet, and when it does, I’ll be a little sad about the end of the great florescence, the great gold rush, of competing ideas and ideals.

Placeblogger is very different from the more conventional online communities I’ve been involved with, like H2otown, which was an online community for the residents of Watertown, Massachusetts.  Perhaps Placeblogger can be taken as an example of how communities of commonality — shared interest, shared geography — are different from communities of innovation, where the participants are shooting off in every direction rather than coming together.

Q: What are some of the things you do to help keep the project on track?

For Placeblogger, my main job is trying to keep out in front of the movement of grassroots, local, online journalism and community.  We can’t really have a community unless we know who’s in it, and Placeblogger is like the census-taker for an exploding population.

Q: Does anyone else help you with it? If so, how do you stay on the same page with them?

I’m passionate about mentoring, so Placeblogger hires student employees every year.  A lot of interns are often stuck with crappy jobs filing or the like, but I don’t hire anyone unless I’m going to turn over something important to them.  I actually turn over large parts of the social media strategy to our new student group each year.  I ask them to do a month of research — reading, brainstorming among themselves — and then to give me a presentation to which I invite other people in the news media or social media world.  They present what they think the social media strategy for our company should be, along with goals they want to meet, broken out month-by-month.   Then?  I turn them loose to do it, and we meet every week to discuss whether or not their theories are working out in practice.

They do a much better job than I do at managing our Facebook presence, I can tell you that.

Q: Have you ever ended up in a tricky situation with community members? How did you handle it?

Placeblogger was started in part because Google is a lot better at answering the question “what” than it is at answering the question “where.”  When we started, local blogs were often languishing on page six or ten of search results — which meant that from the point of view of the Internet, they were effectively invisible.  By creating a single site where you could search for local blogs by location, we effectively made a map of a hole in Google.  Placeblogger has good page rank, so that meant that local blogs were finally making it onto page one of search results, even if that result was a page on Placeblogger pointing to that local blog rather than a link to the blog itself.

Even though our objective was to make local blogs more visible, some placebloggers were miffed that we got better search engine placement than they did on their own and asked to be removed.  So?  We remove them.  But that’s only happened about a half dozen times since we started; we distribute so much traffic to placeblogs that most placebloggers are very happy we’re there for them.  We also don’t make money off of advertising, so we don’t have a conflict of interest with the people we serve, and when we link, we only show a headline plus two hundred characters (that’s also what Google displays in search results).  We don’t want people to hang around and read at Placeblogger — we want them to go and get hooked up with the originating site.

Q: What advice would you give someone who’s starting a new community project that involves a lot of blogs and bloggers? What’s important to know about that culture that people might not realize right away?

You have to accept that the kind of people who will blog on someone else’s site are very different than the people who start and maintain their own sites.  A person who will blog on your site is effectively a volunteer — unless you do something to change it, they won’t have a sense of ownership in your site and that will show up in the regularity and depth of their contributions to your project.  People who maintain their own sites are better thought of as partners rather than contributors — to make that partnership successful, be generous: read their site and link to it.  Don’t ask for something before you give it: if you’re the one who’s ultimately going to benefit, you have to be willing to make the first move, and the first move shouldn’t be a request, it should be a gift.