Local-ness

foursquare:

Meet the Mayor of Momofuku Milk Bar: Zagat just started a series of interviews with mayors of their recommended foursquare venues. First up is Nathan Archambault from one of our favorite places: Momofuku Milk Bar (Umm, did you just say ‘cornflake-marshmallow-chocochip cookie’?). We love this idea and can’t wait for more in the series!

Local-ness meets Las Vegas bigtime

foursquare:

Hmm.. what would foursquare look like on a Las Vegas billboard? Ah, probably something like this… (via dpstyles™)

Now live on the Vegas strip thanks to our friends at LocaModa!

We’re a Favorite Place on Google (via Google)

Appify →

Local apps, organized by city.

News for Oakland. Make that North Oakland.

Sharon on my SylvanLaurelNeighborhood Yahoo! group shared Oakland North, a project of U.C. Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Its mandate is “to explore new ways to give communities back the coverage they’re losing as regional newspapers shrink.”

It has no ads in it, as of yet. But it makes me wonder - how might a brand engage here, zoomed in this close, in an authentic and relevant way?

Local Governments Offer Data to Software Tinkerers  →

Great NYTimes article

“A big pile of city crime reports is not all that useful. But what if you could combine that data with information on bars, sidewalks and subway stations to find the safest route home after a night out?”

Zip Codes: Where you’re from

The Zip Codes Series on Nike’s very nice Jumpman23 site uses local as an interesting lens for storytelling. In 21229 Carmelo Anthony talks about growing up in West Baltimore.

Local lends legitimacy. A zip code is specific. You can pinpoint it on a map. You can go there. It is concrete. It’s an anchor in a drifting world.

Flavorwire » Show Us Your Neighborhood: Enter the Create Flavorpill Local Contest →

“Help us envision the perfect hyperlocal page. Starting with our event feed, how would you show your neighborhood on Flavorpill?”

Starbucks, gone local

Here’s another example of a big brand going local. In this case a brand that’s pretty much synonymous with global homogenization, the polar opposite of local-ness - Starbucks.

Even the name - 15th Ave - carefully invokes place and local-ness.

What might the brand gain from this?  The answers give us some hints at the nature of local-ness:

1. Authenticity: Even a big brand like Starbucks likes to have a little street cred.
2. Heritage: A reminder to folks - internally and externally - that Starbucks was once small, a labor of love.
3. Freedom: Operating outside the confines of the chain, 15th Street can be more entrepreneurial, take greater risks, serving as a laboratory for the brand.
4. Individuality: This one-off store can be unique and have its own point-of-view.

An interesting and useful exercise for the brand. But I can’t help thinking that it’s a form of “karaoke local-ness.” And like the band Pulp says, “The bad cover version of love is not the real thing.”

Different kinds of relevant

We care about things, talk about things, interact around things because they are relevant. On the web, relevant comes in a few flavors:

Relevant ideas. If you’re interested in Japanese denim or The Damned or baby-rearing there’s a blog or a forum out there and you can connect around that. It’s great. It’s world-changing. But it’s also a bit intellectual, abstract, cold. It exists in pixels and between your ears.

Relevant people. Along comes social networks and suddenly you’re not just talking to people who are into the same stuff you, you’re talking to people with whom you have real life connections.

Relevant places. Now, we have a new kind of relevance: location-based. It connects you not to distant friends 30 or 3000 miles away, but to people in the room with you, and to the real space right in front of your eyes.

We can array these types of relevance along a spectrum and see that we’ve moving from a web that’s about ideas to a web that’s about real life.