Goin' Loco on Google Local

Introductory Email

Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2005 10:30:23 -0800
From: "Dave Myers | Open Media Center"
To: asmith-AT-google.com
CC: adam douglas
Subject: Coherent Connectedness: Traversing the Last Mile in Local Search

Hi,

Adam Douglas put me in touch with you. I told him about a project I'm involved with that Google Local might benefit from. Afterward he sent me your email address.

I am a consultant with a focus on open source web publishing technology. My clients include small businesses, community groups, non-profits, and so on. I raise their awareness of the available open source technologies that might benefit them, and help them select, install and use the technologies most appropriate for their needs. Training and support is also usually part of the mix.

Earlier this year I launched a Micro Publishing initiative to focus on working with community-based organizations. The idea is to help them learn how to make better use of open source web publishing technologies to create a stronger presence on the web.

Currently I'm funding much of this activity out of my pocket, and need a sponsor. I believe Google Local could benefit from sponsoring this initiative, and have outlined a few of the reasons why on a wiki page.

In a nutshell, better use of the world wide web by small businesses and community organizations would substantially enhance the overall usefulness of Google Local. These organizations have a vested interest--many have even demonstrated a willingness--to improve their use of the web for information publishing and distribution.

At the aforementioned wiki link I've outlined some of the hurdles these folks face. Please take a look at it when you can, and don't hesitate to call me at any time. I look forward to your feedback.

With kind regards,

Dave Myers * Publisher
Open Media Center
(503) 294-1234 * (503) 294-1212/fax
(800) WEB-VIEW * (800) WPJ-VIEW/fax
http://openmediacenter.org/ * http://micropublishing.org/

Copy of the Wiki Content Cited in Above Email Shown Below

Coherent Connectedness: Traversing the Last Mile in Local Search

Through the years I've observed an unyielding struggle most small businesses and other community-based organizations face when using the world wide web: microscopic budgets and macroscopic ignorance. With few exceptions, people responsible for a small organization's web presence struggle to grasp the bewildering array of technologies involved.

Attempts by these folks at developing their web presence often end in grief. After putting a site up, they almost always fail to develop a strong enough budget to maintain it. More than ten years after the web became commercially available, the typical small organization web development scenario remains the norm:
a) design a website
b) throw it up on the web
c) express disappointment with its performance

But in the past year or so I've noticed many of these same people are looking at what they're doing (or not doing) on the web with renewed interest. This resurgent attention coincides with a number of reasonably mature web applications emerging from the open source. Many of these technologies are potentially quite useful to smaller organizations.

Useful, that is, only if people running these small outfits are aware of them and can figure out how to use them. For most folks operating at the mini/micro organization level, emerging open source technology is almost incomprehensible, and budgets are generally too small to hire the expertise to implement it effectively.

This means that many K-12 schools, churches, main street small businesses, union shops, community radio stations, activist organizations and others fail to harness the technology that is potentially available to them. That, in turn, keeps a tremendous wealth of information locked out of the world wide web. These organizations, and the constituency they serve, suffer as a result.

But a couple of other interests lose out as well: Google, and Google users. Small businesses, institutions and grassroots organizations generate information that is among the most valuable to local communities. The hurdles they face in making this information easily accessible over the web creates a lose-lose situation that, in one way or another, negatively affects all of us.

I currently consult to several local activist groups, a small church, and a community radio station on using open source technologies to beef up their web presence. My primary focus is on training them to use CMS applications like Mambo or Geek Log, databases like MySQL or PostgreSQL, and a variety of other freely-available open source technologies. I also guide them on site design and usability.

Few of these folks can afford to pay me, so I donate my time and pay for incidental expenses out of pocket. This has left me with scarce time to recruit new paying clients, and I'm going broke. I also have to turn away a significant number of potential clients for whom I have neither the budget nor the time to help.

The biggest stumbling block for these people is the lack of easy-to-understand manuals and guides they need to successfully install and administer these technologies. Even when they're lucky and aware enough to find a web host equipped with tools like cPanel and Fantastico (allowing them, for example, to install a content management system like Mambo or Geek Log with point & click ease) they still have trouble customizing the application to meet their specific needs.

But lately I've also witnessed an unprecedented interest among these micro players to get up to web speed. One reason is because the communities they serve simply expect nothing less. Also, many small businesses that once relied on the yellow pages for much of their marketing have watched directory ad rates continue to climb, even as this advertising mode's effectiveness plummets. Most have slashed their directory advertising footprint, but, because of the issues cited above, are at a loss for how to replace it.

The opportunity for Google here is to close what I see as the "local search last mile." Based on the experiences I've had working with people in the small business/organization space, I've become convinced a significant portion of them would use open source technology to improve their web presence if these resources were presented to them in a clear, user-friendly format.

The experiences I've accumulated in this space gives me a strong understanding of where to begin addressing these issues. I also have a good sense of what the challenges are. But the outreach, consultation, experimentation, and just plain trial and error required to help most of these organizations begin successfully using these powerful technologies will take time and money.

Google Local should consider sponsoring a research project that focuses on discovering the inflection point where non-technical folks are able to successfully integrate these technologies into their workflow. The potential pay-off to locally-based economies and their communities is clear. The benefit to Google Local would come as the community-level knowledge infrastructure is strengthened, expanded, and becomes easily accessible via the world wide web. This improvement, of course, will generate greatly-improved localized search results.

The momentum to become the "new yellow pages" is already going Google Local's direction. The main impediment is the uneven quality of web presence representing businesses and organizations at the hyper-local level. They simply haven't had the ability or resources to take advantage of the freely-available technologies that could significantly enhance their web publishing and communications efforts. But once that resource gap closes, and they're able to make use of these powerful tools, we'll all benefit by more easily traversing the proverbial "last mile" in local search.

dave myers
davy-AT-davy.us
http://micropublishing.org/
(503) 294-1234