The 9th Neighbor

Theater, Art and Tea for Boston Bloggers

2008-04-29T18:08:00.001-04:00

Do you blog in the Boston area? Interested in food? Arts? Culture?

If the answer is yes, yes, yes, check out the new list of event invitations for local bloggers on 9Neighbors.

When you log into 9Neighbors.com, you'll now find a list of offers and invitations from local businesses and cultural institutions. Right now that means you'll see invitations to Saturday tea at Upstairs on the Square, tickets to upcoming shows at the Huntington Theatre and free admission to the Isabella Stuart Gardner Museum. More are coming.

Our goal here is simple: We want to create a way for quality local businesses and cultural organizations to reach out to bloggers, but to let bloggers choose the opportunities they take advantage of. We hope this gives popular bloggers more of the opportunities available to traditional media, while cutting down on PR spam like this or this.

If you're interested in some of these invitations, sign up for 9Neighbors and check out our event listings, or subscribe to our feed of event listings here.

Changes at 9Neighbors, Invitations for Boston-Area Bloggers

2008-04-28T13:22:00.005-04:00

Today we're rolling out some big changes on 9Neighbors.

As of today, 9Neighbors is a directory of Boston-area blogs, not a news site. Instead of focusing on popular individual posts, 9Neighbors is now centered on data about local blogs.

The new 9Neighbors also makes it easy for local businesses to reach out to bloggers with invitations to special events. Right now on the site we're listing offers from Upstairs on the Square, The Gardner Museum and The Huntington Theatre. There are more coming.

Why are we making these changes?

Well, in the months since we launched 9Neighbors, we've discovered that there's a lot of interest in the data we collect about local blogs -- who's linking to who, how often people are publishing and who writes about what. Bloggers want to know how their sites stack up, and businesses want to know who's creating buzz around town. Currently, it's easy to find this information for the global community of blogs, but not for local communities.

The deals and invitations are also an important part of the new site. We think these will benefit both bloggers and local businesses.

There are a lot of quality businesses, cultural institutions and arts organizations around Boston that want to reach out to bloggers with invitations and free passes to events, the same way they do to traditional media. At the same time, there are a lot of bloggers who'd like to take advantage of some of these offers, when they're relevant and interesting.

Without a directory of local blog data, it's hard for local businesses to know which bloggers to reach out to. And without a filter for invitations, bloggers end up overwhelmed in PR spam, like this.

The new 9Neighbors will provide both a directory and filter. Local businesses can send me invitations they'd like to offer bloggers (rick at faneuilmedia dot com), and bloggers who register for the site can signup for a feed of invitations.

Businesses and bloggers are central to our communities. They help keep the places we live unique and vital. We hope this new version of 9Neighbors supports both.

One last note: Today's launch is a first step. The transition from news site to directory is going to take some time, and we'd love your feedback as we make it. If you have thoughts or questions, please let us know.

Pothole Map

2008-03-01T14:14:00.004-05:00

As a little bit of a side project, we launched a map of potholes around town yesterday. You can find it here: http://9neighbors.com/potholes

Anybody can add to the map, so if you know of specific offenders, by all means, add them.

I'm going to get in touch with the public works folks in Somerville, Cambridge and other pothole hotspots to see if they can add these to their to-do list.

Introducing Placenotes

2008-02-28T22:37:00.011-05:00

If you live even a little of your life online, it's probably scattered across a lot of different sites -- photos on Flickr, friends on Facebook, one-liners on Twitter, and on and on.

Unfortunately, there's no simple way to collect all the bits you produce related to the place you live -- or share them with other people who live in that place.

For my Facebook and Twitter friends in other places, posts about Martha Coakley and the Central Sq Florist are nothing but noise. On the other hand, my friends who live in the Boston area may find this stuff interesting, and I want them to see it.

So today we're launching a solution to that problem -- Placenotes.

9Neighbors Placenotes are a drop-dead simple way to put all your local content in one place, and share it with friends and folks in your community.

Take a look at mine, and you'll see what I mean. On my page I'm aggregating:

> Photos I load into Flickr with the tag "9Neighbors"
> Posts to my Twitter account that include "#9n"
> Items on 9Neighbors that I vote for.
> Notes & links I post on 9Neighbors
> The feed for my blog (www.rickburnes.com)

You can set all this up on the 9Neighbors "Settings" page. Add your Twitter and Flickr username on the Profile Data tab, and any feeds you want on the "Feeds Settings" tab.

If you follow me, new items I produce will show up in your From Your Friends tab every time you log onto 9Neighbors.

We've created Placenotes to be a super-simple way to collect and share local content. Try them out, decide what you think, and let us know. We'd love to hear from you.

Following Your Friends on 9Neighbors

2008-02-22T09:32:00.006-05:00

A few people have asked about the concept of "following" somebody on 9Neighbors.

Here's what it means: When you signup to "follow" somebody, you see all the things they find interesting on the site. That means that all the items they've voted for, links they've added and notes they've written will appear in the "Your News" tab at the top of your home page.

The goal is to give folks another way of filtering the site. The Popular Today tab provides a view of what's currently popular, the Most Recent tab lists the most recent items in the system, and Your News gives you a way to keep track of the items your friends find interesting.

If you're just getting started on 9Neighbors and looking for people to follow, you can find lots of people here.

Follow Us on Twitter, Get a Thing a Day

2008-01-08T11:38:00.000-05:00

Last Sunday, at another great Boston Media Makers gathering, I told folks about some of the gems bubbling to the surface on 9Neighbors.

There was the video of a hawk lunching on a pigeon on Boston Common. The great pair of videos from Somerville City TV on the Assembly Square project. The photo of Dice-K's Nikes in the classical Greek art section of the MFA. I could go on and on -- lots of wonderful stuff.

In the flurry of tweets that followed BMM, I decided Twitter would be a good way to let people know about items I find.

So I setup 9N -- our 9Neighbors Twitter account. We'll use the account to send out a link that we like every day.

If you have link suggestions (for 9Neighbors the site, or the Twitter account), just reply to us via Twitter (@9n).

How Flickr Photos Appear on 9Neighbors

2008-01-07T23:21:00.000-05:00

A Flickr user contacted us today wondering about our policy on use of Flickr photos.

Here it is:

We use photos distributed by Flickr in its feeds. Mostly, we use feeds for local tags like this one: api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?tags=bostonma. Sometimes we also use feeds for specific users.

According to Flickr, photos that appear in feeds like the one above can be blogged, as long as attribution and links to the original item are provided (which we do). A Flickr user can prevent photos from appearing in feeds by switching the "Who can blog your photos" setting on this page: www.flickr.com/account/?tab=privacy.

I'm blogging this because we want to make sure we get it right. Hopefully folks will point out any problems or gray areas in the comments.

And the Most Popular Photos of December Were ...

2008-01-02T13:46:00.000-05:00

Here they are, the winners of our first Shoot9N contest:

For Boston, it was "Swan Lake" by Sweetbriar

For Somerville, "Davis Square: Iced T Leaves" by rnolan1087

And for Cambridge, an untitled photo by baoram07

Congratulations to the winners. It's fun to see such wonderful local photography. I'm going to send them all a lovely book of photos.

We're going to be running Shoot9N again this month, so check back over the course of the month to vote on your favorite photos.

And Now ... A Little Contest

2007-12-14T11:27:00.000-05:00

Now that our sorting and recommendation features are up and running, we're going to kick their tires with a little contest -- a local photo contest we're calling Shoot9N.

At the end of this month we're going to recognize the photos that were most popular with 9Neighbors users over the last month. We'll define most popular by the full-month rankings on our photo pages like this one in Somerville. In order to vote, you need to be registered with 9Neighbors. (That's easy to do here.)

If you're a photographer, it's simple to get your photos onto our site and into the contest. Just load them into Flickr, and tag them with either "Boston9N", "Cambridge9N" or "Somerville9N". We'll pick a winner from each community (the photo must be taken in the community). For now, we're going to keep the contest to just Boston, Cambridge and Somerville.

Shoot9N is an experiment. This time around we're just trying to gauge interest and see how it works. We hope to do more with it future months.

Ultimately, our goals with Shoot9N are the same as our goals with 9Neighbors. We want to draw attention to the great stories being told in and about our communities, and we want to support the people telling them.

New This Week: Recommendations

2007-12-12T14:18:00.000-05:00

This week's 9Neighbors update is a big step forward.

As of Sunday evening, you can recommend any story you find on 9Neighbors.com. By recommending a story, you give it a vote that will help it rise in the rankings we're now using to sort our "Popular" pages. That means the best content in your community is getting a broader audience.

It's very easy to recommend an item. You can do so on the new "Recommend this?" line on 9Neighbors.com, or in the small frame we're now adding above pages you click to from 9Neighbors.

It's only been a few days since we enabled recommendations, but they've completely changed the site. Instead of a random stream of all recent content, our pages now bubble great stuff to the top, and keep it there for a bit.

The current Somerville page is a great example. It's linking to a Live Journal discussion about privacy and Tufts University's Naked Quad run, a great photo from Flickr user rnolan108, a post about a bike accident on Clarendon Hill this morning, a city notice on lice, a School Committee report on its goals, and several stories from the Somerville Journal. We're thrilled to see such a broad range of content on the site.

We're going to continue to incorporate your feedback and improve 9Neighbors. As we move forward, we hope to make it even easier for people to discover their community's best new media and information.

What's Your Topic?

2007-12-05T15:58:00.000-05:00

New feature alert!

For the past week we've been rolling out a major new addition to 9Neighbors: topic pages.

Now, in addition to the main summaries of links we provide for each of our five communities, we're also grouping articles in each community into categories. Each of these categories has its own feed. So, if you want a simple way to follow stories about the Cambridge city workers arrested for selling drugs out of a city-owned truck last week, you can subscribe to the Cambridge crime page. You can check out the other topics in each community's topic index.

As you can see from the image below, we're also linking to topic pages from the article summaries we provide on our main pages. We hope these links provide folks with more context for the items we list on 9Neighbors.
We have lots more news in the pipeline, so stayed tuned. And, as always, we'd love to hear from you.

Add Your Feeds to 9Neighbors

2007-11-12T14:55:00.000-05:00

Eagle-eyed 9Neighbors-users may have already figured this out, but we launched an update of the site over the weekend.

This time the headliner is a new feed function.

If you produce any type of feed about your community, you can now build a bigger audience by loading your feed into 9Neighbors. Just paste your feed address into the form on this page. Once it's loaded, a headline and short summary will appear on 9Neighbors every time you publish new content.

Here's what you'll see when you add the feed:

As always, let us know if you have any feedback. We'd love to hear from you.

New Release, New Features

2007-10-10T06:00:00.000-04:00

Here's the low-down on three super new features we released yesterday:

Following -- You can now follow the browsing activity of your friends on 9Neighbors. This is a great way to filter the content in your community.

We aggregate a lot of content in Cambridge. It's too much for me to consume, but the following feature is helping me solve that problem. When I sign up to follow my friends, I get a feed of links that they enjoyed. This stuff tends to be more interesting to me than the larger body of Cambridge content.

Personalization -- When you sign up to follow friends on 9Neighbors, you'll notice a change on your news page. In addition to the Recent and Popular sorting-method options at the top of the page, you'll see a new Personalized link. This is your page of personally filtered news for that community.

Share a Link -- Over the past few weeks, I've been in a lot of situations where I wanted to share a Cambridge news story with local friends, but wasn't able to because the article wasn't on 9Neighbors. That problem is now solved. If you see something you want to share with other folks in the community, you can now submit it via the link in right column of the news pages.

As always, let us know what you think about these changes -- or anything else on the site. We'd love to hear your feedback. (You can reach us at info *AT* 9neighbors.com.)

What 9Neighbors Is All About (Example #1)

2007-10-08T01:41:00.000-04:00

Anybody wondering what 9Neighbors is all about should check out our Cambridge news page today. You'll find it's full of wonderful photos of this weekend's Honk Fest, taken by Flickr user cmurtaugh.

These are fantastic pictures. They give you a real sense of what was going on along Mass Ave today.

9Neighbors is designed to make content like this easy to find.

Site Updates & Berkman Demo

2007-10-04T16:17:00.000-04:00

Based on some early feedback, we've made a number of changes and additions to 9Neighbors this week.

Here are the top three:

Better Community Navigation -- It's now very easy to switch between Cambridge and Somerville, or Somerville and Boston, or Boston and Brookline. You get the idea.

Private Option -- 9Neighbors allows you to share your viewing history with other members of your community. But not everybody wants a public viewing history, so it's now possible to make your account "Private" by selecting the appropriate box on the Settings page. Accounts that are Private will not be visible to other users.

Photos -- You can now upload a photo on your profile.

I'm going to be showing the site to the Berkman Blog Group at 7 this evening. If you're in the neighborhood, stop by. (Directions are here.)

Welcome!

2007-09-28T11:39:00.000-04:00

Congratulations. You've discovered 9Neighbors, the new local news filtering service from Faneuil Media.

We just pushed the site live last night, and have lots on our to-do list.

In the mean time, we'd love to know what you think of the site. What works? What doesn't? What changes and additions would you like to see?

Please send any feedback you have to our Google Group at this address:
Alternatively, you can contact us directly here:
We look forward to hearing from you!