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Instivate, Inc. is looking for an online advertising sales representative to join our Seattle startup as Employee #4! Our network of Seattle news and neighborhood blogs is a cutting edge leader in the hyperlocal wave. Here are some of the outstanding local sites we power:
We are seeking a hard charging sales representative to sell advertising across these sites. We provide a base salary, generous commission structure and benefits options. Please help us spread the word about this great opportunity. Please contact justin@instivate.com with resumes/questions/etc. If you know how to reach the right people to quickly close win/win advertising deals, read on. You are an excellent self-manager, dedicated to analytical, systematic sales approaches but also extremely comfortable helping local businesses put their messages in front of our growing Seattle audience.... It's been a week since we launched the SeattleCrime iPhone app -- our first step in bringing high quality mobile experiences to the community news space. We are proud to say we're zooming through our first 1,000 downloads and, more importantly, the SeattleCrime iPhone app is the highest rated top Seattle news app in the Apple Store. Here are the six apps Apple currently features -- some big names here including Seattle Times and KIRO.
Out of all of them, only Crime is currently rocking a 4-star user rating.
And in our time climbing through the rest of the 31 apps that come up for the search "Seattle news," SeattleCrime had the highest rating we could find. Thanks for the support and we're glad you like it. If you don't have it yet, download the SeattleCrime app here. At Instivate, our work developing Neighborlogs community news sites has helped us create low cost, powerful sites for larger independent news and information efforts. One of these sites is SeattleCrime. It's a fantastic city news site run by a pro journalist and powered by Instivate technology. We're extremely proud to announce an exciting new component of the site -- the SeattleCrime iPhone App. Developed in conjunction with mobile partner Purple Robots, the app showcases many of the tenets of our news and info delivery philosophy -- and, of course, the city's crime news flow keeps things interesting with great stories. Here is what the app does:
The SeattleCrime app is the kind of thing we love to build. Useful to anybody who's ever seen a cop car... We enjoyed this interview with Tracy Record, one of the great characters helping to put the Pacific Northwest hyperlocal scene at the center of the hyperlocal community news map along with us here in Seattle. But we felt bad when we saw this reply to a question a lot of people ask about dedicated hyperlocal efforts:
We don't recommend three hours of sleep for anybody -- especially not a news and information gathering entrepreneur. Just for the record, I average about seven hours of sleep per night and Instivate prez Scott Durham of Central District News<... 
A Seattle neighborhood news site is out with its second annual look at the top Web media properties in Seattle. Like any good ranking system, there are plenty of holes to point out in the methodology combining Quantcast, Alexa and other rankings in a 'secret sauce' recipe but Belltown Dispatch's list is fun to dig into nonetheless. Instivate, the Seattle start-up behind Neighborlogs, is proud to point out that we power eight of the top 75 sites in the rankings. Not bad when you consider we're up against media behemoths like Hearst, Fox and, the #1 online Seattle media property, the Seattle Times. Here's a table showing the rankings with markings highlighting sites powered by our technology as well as the sites involved in a local news partnership with the Seattle Times which we feel should be a model for big media + little media collaboration. We've also marked the kinds of sites Neighborlogs loves most -- online-only indie neighborhood news sites -- in red. And, oh, by the way, we also power the Belltown Dispatch!... Neighborlogs features run deep. Community news providers get:
And it's all free. To add a new opportunity to the Instivate family of services, this week we are rolling out InstiAds. The new self-serve ad service takes the Neighborlogs advertising system and makes it available on any community news and information Web site regardless of platform, codebase or service. You can register for the InstiAds Beta here. The new service lets anybody set their own prices and provide advertising services designed for local businesses. Here is a look at the self-serve wizard:
The service also includes easy to use Logo + Text layouts that allow businesses with limited budgets to create and update great looking display ads without a graphic designer.
If you are operating an existing local news and information... Seattle is at the forefront of a wave of independent, local online news and information. It's fun to watch the trends. Political and news online wonkfest Publicola today announced they are hiring an advertising rep. We'll go them one better. We hired an ad rep on Friday. Meet Eric Kelly eric@instiads.com Eric will be leading the way in ad sales on the Neighborlogs network of neighborhood news blogs. Drop him a line today if you'd like to have your message associated with truly local community news and information. Eric can get you hooked up across the Neighborlogs network, one any of the sites utilizing our services like SeattlePostGlobe.org or TheSunbreak.com and any of our partner sites. With Big Media sniffing around (here and here) the hyperlocal space in Seattle and also gearing up for a go in Portland and these 6 new features rolled out to everybody using our service and tools, we thought it might be a good time to compare and contrast Neighborlogs vs. Big Media 'Hood Sites. Here are some features to consider if you find yourself making the decision between contributing to a big media local news effort or building something real for your community.
Ready to start your own Neighborlogs site? Send me a note or register for our Beta today. We're happy to announce several new Beta features for Neighborlogs that we believe will make your local news and information sites even more important parts of your communities.
Today's Seattle Times announcement is a happy thing for the four community news businesses involved in the hyperlocal partnership including my own site, CapitolHillSeattle.com. But the partnership will be meaningless the next time there is breaking news in a neighborhood not named in the press release. If this partnership does what it is supposed to, the system of communication and the internal news culture that the Seattle Times is trying to build will be put into motion to connect Seattle's news audience with community news providers across the city. That change is much more important than today's announcement. The systems, procedures and, maybe, technology the Times will develop around this partnership have the potential to drag big media forward to give community news a begrudging respect and change the interaction with the independent news sites from ignorance to respectful attention. It won't be an immediate change but the new habits are starting to be formed already. When these initial partners break...  Bus Plow Originally uploaded by AdonisPhotos Many will say that Seattle's incumbent mayor Greg Nickels failed to make it through the city's primary and into the fall general election because of snow. But the weather wasn't really the problem. The problem was information. Seattle was hit with a situation that required systems of communication and information distribution that it did not have. The city's dying newspapers couldn't keep up and City Hall's various departments were too busy trying to dig out from underneath the snow and ice to turn to their antiquated systems of information distribution. They couldn't connect information to the neighborhoods and streets where it was needed. The County's Metro bus system fared no better despite its established Web site. There was no planned information core to power Seattle. And so it slipped on the icy sidewalks and tried to make the best of it. But the best wasn't good enough for the mayor to keep his job. The lesson for the surviving candidates Joe Mallahan and... Everything we do at Neighborlogs is geared toward one thing: giving people the ability to create and maintain great community news and information sites. It goes beyond tools and web pages. Part of survival for many neighborhood blog efforts is figuring out a way to financially support the effort required to maintain a useful site. So we're happy to announce an important Neighborlogs milestone. Today, we are proud to feature our first network advertising partner running across the Neighborlogs Seattle network of sites. Here's a look at the STITA Taxi campaign from the Eastlake Ave site:
The network advertising component joins our already powerful self-serve ad system built into every site to give site owners multiple potential revenue opportunities. We've also built in a commission process that richly! rewards sites for originating network buys. It's an exciting development for our business and for the businesses that are building on our service. If you are interested in associating your message with original,... Neighborlogs is having fun growing in the middle of journalism's storms of change. Sites using our service are part of what comes next for local news and information. We're learning so much watching it play out and working to build the tools and services people need for the new era. There is a lot to learn here and, so, it seems like a good opportunity for a student to join the team. We are creating an intern position with our company -- Neighborlogs Seattle Editor. The editor will gather news and information in the Seattle area including working with the Seattle Police Department and city government to cover news and events. The editor will also assist with the entirety of the start-up business including marketing and working with customers across the country using the Neighborlogs service. It should be a good gig and awesome opportunity to see the frontlines of how local information gathering is changing. Plus, the Neighborlogs Seattle Editor will have a swell mentor. I've been working in online media for... Want to know more about the business behind my own neighborhood blog? Jane Stevens digs into CapitolHillSeattle.com in this case study to find out more about how I run the site and utilize the Neighborlogs service. It's a cool write-up. I even learned a little about my business just seeing the details of it all. reJurno case study: CapitolHillSeattle.com
When talking with people considering joining the Neighborlogs beta -- btw, you should consider joining the Neighborlogs beta if you are thinking about starting a neighborhood blog or want to transition your existing site to a service geared to your needs -- I sometimes feel like I'm describing those old Total breakfast cereal commercials. You'd have to eat 8 bowls of blah blah blah to get the nutrition in one bowl of Total! But we do have a lot of goodness packed into the Neighborlogs service. We have a solution that provides ten essentials of a hyperlocal news and info site:
We're getting Seattle-area Neighborlogs site owners together to talk neighborhood blogging and get some feedback on our 'hood bloggin tools and services -- and also enjoy some beer and pizza. If you are interested in Neighborlogs and want to meet some of the people behind great Seattle sites like TheSouthLake.com, InterbayDistrict.com and Ravennanation.com, we'd be happy to meet you, too. RSVP here. 1st Ever Seattle Neighborlogs Meetup! Seattle's craigslist site is a busy place. It's also kind of a drag --simultaneously a great way to reach a lot of people in the area AND guarantee several days of frustrating flakes, frauds and e-mail tag. But we're not here (only!) to kick Craigslist around -- it's a great service and will likely always be a big part of the local Internet experience. We do, however, want to learn more about the opportunities left behind by the big CL or eBay's kijiji, or even aggregator Oodle. So we're working on our own classifieds solution for neighborhood blogging. We rolled out an early version of the service on my 'hood blog:
It's a simple start. But we're excited to see how the following factors play out.
Here's the bad news: We had a 18 hour outage today, and lost about 30 hours of data between Saturday at 6:30pm, and Sunday morning at 3:00am. I figure we might as well be as transparent as possible about how it happened. Maybe it will help drive the lessons learned home for us and anyone else out there who might read it. Traffic has been growing quickly across the network, and we're preparing to launch a beta version of a new product that will drive it significantly higher. So it seemed like a sleepy Sunday morning would be a good time to catch up on some infrastructure projects that would make sure we could maintain good service levels in coming months. The first part of that was to toughen up our backup solution. For 18 months we've being running nightly database backups. It was pretty simple, but theoretically effective: dump the database to a file, and copy the file to a remote network storage that was physically distant from our operational servers. That backup solution... 
Our default configuration for Neighborlogs sites is to accept anonymous comments, allowing for readers to make an easy first step into being contributors without making the time commitment of signing up for an official account. It makes it easy for people to interact with the site, and we've found that we get a lot of good thoughts, tips, and information from our anonymous commenters. The risk of having open comments is spam. It only takes a little while before the spammers will find your new blog and its open comments and try to fill up your pages with all sorts of exciting offers for prescription drugs and work-from-home scams. There's a whole army of robots and humans out there that spend a whole lot of time trying to do that. Back at the end of October we saw a sudden spike of attempted spam on several sites, reaching almost 20,000 attempts per day. That volume led to some spam getting through our previous filters, so we spent a lot of time this month on a new generation of tools to help combat the problem.... The Neighborlogs private beta is in full swing. By the way, neighborhood bloggers interested in getting involved in the beta can register here. We have sites on the network that range from veteran 'hood blogs like Central District News to newbies like North of 85th. We're in search of an independent ad genius to get involved and help boost ad sales across this network on the various neighborhood sites. You'll bring new advertisers onto the network and introduce them to our easy to use self-serve ad management tools. You'll earn a commission and Neighborlog love. You'll learn about the challenges and triumphs of bringing online advertising to the small and medium businesses that are just starting to make the Internet leap. The network is in its early stages, so the opportunity is too but this is a good gig for somebody just getting started or for a seasoned expert to add to their roster. Want to know more? Drop me a line: jseattle at gmail. Last night's Blogsgiving 2008 event in Seattle was a big success. Neighborlogs teamed up with Seattlest and Seattle Metblogs to host a gathering of Seattle area bloggers at Grey Gallery on Capitol Hill. We also made handturkeys! There were several Seattle area neighborhood blogs represented:
(sorry if I missed you in the list -- let me know!!!) We also had great turnout from Seattle's non-neighborhood blog community -- everything from sn0tty.com to TeachStreet. With my own neighborhood blog being focused on Capitol Hill, I was especially pleased to meet people from other Hill sites including the lovely ladies and one chap from captothehill and the smarty pants behind IheartSea. There was lots of socializing and networking. Free cupcakes. Stiff drinks. Name tags and souvenir buttons. We raised more than $400 for Northwest Harvest. If you didn't make it out this year, start making your... Welcome to the Neighborlogs Blog. Here we'll keep you up to date on our new Neighborlogs service, highlight some of the best sites on our network and discuss all things "neighborhood blogging." Our goals for Neighborlogs are simple -- build the best possible tools for local blogging and advertising. Everything we build is focused on helping people create great sites about the places where they live. We want neighborhood bloggers to use our tools and services to create sites that they own and run. We're currently in a private beta of our service. Want to see a Neighborlogs neighborhood blog in action? Here are five sites to check out:
The Neighborlogs network is growing so we'll feature these and other sites as they come online. You can also follow along in the From our Network section of the Neighborlogs homepage. Our beta sites range from veteran neighborhood... 
Neighborhood blogging has existed only for a few years. There is no manual or set of instructions to explain how to create a successful and profitable neighborhood blog. The skills are mainly learned through trial and error over the course of many months or even years. |
