I'll be part of a panel on hyperlocal news blogging at Saturday's Digital Journalism Camp Portland.

Hyper-local news: What works and what doesn’t

• Cornelius Swart, editor, Portland Sentinel

• Ken Aaron, NeighborhoodNotes.com

• Justin Carder, Neighborlogs

• Moderator: Michelle V. Rafter, journalist

You can follow the conference action on this feed page. If you are coming to this post after hearing what I had to say in the session, the links below are background that shape my opinions. If you are coming to this page before the session, see you on Saturday!

What works and what doesn't

1. Be part of a local ad network even if it's a partnership between only two sites.
2. Create a respected news and information site in your community and reach out to advertisers who want to associate their message with this resource.
3. Learn from respected, brilliant, handsome pioneers :)
4. Start a site in Portland.
5. Find solutions so you can do these 7 things a hyperlocal skeptic says you can't:...

If you are looking for inspiration for your first neighborhood blog post, here's a look at how three of Seattle's leading neighborhood bloggers got started -- and to be fair, I've included my first 'hood blog post. Ever! In some, you can see there was a plan from day one to create a local news and information site that was vital to the community. But you can also see glimpses of the uncertainty and early exploration that comes with creating something new. My favorite element of these examples is the promise underlying each. As the first West Seattle Blog entry from Christmas Eve 2005 promises, there is, indeed, much more to come.

My first 'hood blogging post (May 9, 2005, btw) was an only-slightly-cringe-inducing manifesto:

Want to cringe along with me while reading my other early posts?

West Seattle's premier was more of a test launch with way more editorial commentary than you'll ever find on their just-the-facts (and all-the-facts!) site today:

You can peruse WSB's other early posts here.

Seattle's other...

My neighborhood news site is doing well in the advertising department. I've written about my small (but growing!) ad revenue in the past. It's a testament to the Neighborlogs self-serve ad system and it's also a cool opportunity to study how small and local businesses behave in the local news advertising environment.

One anecdotal observation I have made on my own site is the seeming frequency of new advertisers starting on a Saturday. So I decided to take a look at the usage dataset from across all sites using the Neighborlogs service to see if the numbers line up with my observations.

Turns out, Saturday is, indeed, special when it comes to small, local businesses and self-serve advertising. The Day of Week bar graph below shows three measurements from the Neighborlogs network of sites. The blue bars represent activity by advertisers, the red bars represent all activity on the sites and the green bar represents the delta between the red and blue bars. The advertiser and all activity values are indexed so...

I operate my neighborhood news site as a business -- right now CapitolHillSeattle.com is my main source of contribution to the Justinc family coffers. Like any good start-up, Instivate (the maker of Neighborlogs!) is about equity and the long-term. But I also utilize my site as a test bed of neighborhood blogging and online journalism.

Recently, I started an experiment that is kind of crazy given the trials and tribulations currently striking the print journalism landscape. Every Sunday, I produce a print edition of my neighborhood blog.

I use the FeedJournal service to automatically convert my RSS feed into an 8-page PDF newspaper complete with a masthead, banner headlines, pictures and, thanks to one of Neighborlogs' cooler features, advertisements. On the plus side, it's mostly auto-magical -- I simply point the service at my feed, click and get the PDF. The service automatically selects a layout -- even automatically picking a lead story which sometimes deserves the slot, sometimes does not -- and churns...

The subject of Cost Per Click advertising rates came up on the Journalism That Matters email list yesterday, and Tracy of West Seattle Blog raised an excellent point:

For local businesses advertising on ultralocal sites, display is the most successful model - raise awareness that the business exists - not clickthru. Can't speak to other types but we frequently explain this WRT our ads.

This completely matches with our own experience across our Neighborlogs network.

Too many people have focused on CPC because it's what worked for Google.  But Google got started doing contextual search advertising.  If someone does a search for hammers, it makes sense to show them an ad for hammers, and then charge the advertiser a transactional fee if the user clicks on a link where they might buy a hammer from some online ecommerce-enabled website.

But the hyper-local space is totally different:
1.  People don't typically go to hyperlocal news sites because they're in the market to buy something - it lacks that immediate transactional...

Getting more and more questions about the ad system from Neighborlogs site owners so time to say a bit more about how the Neighborlogs advertising system works.

• As a Neighborlogs site owner, you control your ads. We give you a default set-up when you create your site but you are free to move and remove and add anything you want to enhance your site and business. To add/remove/move, right click as you would with any content element and choose from the pop-up menu.
• Even if you aren't operating your site as a business, the Neighborlogs ad system can be a good way to promote your site features or organizations in your neighborhood. You can add 'house' ads by going through the same advertising process as any advertiser -- click an Advertise Here link and get started. Select "Site Promotion" or "Public Service Announcement" in the wizard process.
• When there are no sold ads or promo ads in your system, the ad placements show adsense. To have these ads credit your own Google Adsense account, create an adsense account...

Take a look at this graph. It's my record of activity as a neighborhood blogger on Twitter (jseattle if you want to follow :) ). Thanks to Tweetstats for the cool visualization of my account. I'm no technical analyst but that looks like an uptrend.

What's behind my explosion of activity in support of my work on capitolhillseattle.com? Part of it, I'll admit, is me finding a new toy. But I'm not really one to spend time on something just because it's fun. There's purpose in my Twitter-use.

While I've had a Twitter account since August 2007, I didn't really start using it until this fall when I noticed pro writer friends using Twitter in a way I hadn't really given much thought in relation to my neighborhood blogging. They were planning stories, sharing early tidbits, promoting completed work and pointing at other sites and tools that were related to their areas of expertise. And, yeah, they were also occasionally mentioning what they had for lunch. I started experimenting with the same kind of conversation...

A lot of times the best stories for your neighborhood will come when you're out in it, away from your computer. Whether it's big breaking news or something quirky you come across, you need a good way to post about it without waiting to get back home.

The recent snow storms here in Seattle gave us good motivation to spend some time on our mobile blogging features. People wanted to know what routes were passable, what was closed, and generally what was happening around the 'hood.

Here's an example of a post I did completely on my iPhone while out walking around the snow-filled streets.

Here's how it works:

1. Go to your profile page and click the edit link. There's a "Posting by email" section at the bottom of the edit page that lets you enter your mobile email address and configure the address to send posts and updates to.
2. When you want to create a mobile post, just send an email from your phone to the @neighborlogs address from your profile edit page.  The subject becomes the title of the post and...

Anybody can post to a Neighborlogs site. While most sites using the Neighborlogs service are owned and operated by an individual content entrepreneur or small team of neighborhood volunteers, anybody can sign up to contribute a post to their local site. The result is often an expanded definition of what a neighborhood blog is and can be. Instead of a single, monotone voice, enabling open contributorship helps create sites that are more inclusive and cover the widest possible breadth of topics.

But all this newfangled Web 2.0 inclusiveness doesn't work without some good old-fashioned discretion. Nothing appears on a Neighborlogs homepage without being selected from the site queue by the site owner and contributors with special privileges. This layer of selection is what elevates the Neighborlogs community features above a basic message board or forum. 

Posts on a site using the Neighborlogs service represent, for the most part, an elevation of the dialogue. It's not enough to slap up a title and a one-sentence...

We'll probably post lots of high-falutin' stuff like this on the Neighborlogs blog full of stats and prognostications and pontifications. But every now and then we'll get down to the grit of the matter, roll up our sleeves and talk shop about our experiences with neighborhood blogging. Given that it is now the most magical time of the year, it's a good time to discuss a problem plaguing 'hood bloggers for hundreds of years.

Can a neighborhood blogger take a vacation?

Finding time for vacation is not a problem unique to bloggers covering their neighborhood's news, of course, but it's also more difficult to write about what's going on down the street when you are far, far away from that street. Here are five strategies to consider -- I've tried each with varying levels of success. If you have anything you've tried to add, please jump in with a comment.

1. Go on vacation and don't tell anybody
   I tried this early on in my 'hood blogging days when capitolhillseattle.com was small and readership had just...