Why YourLocal London is now free for local businesses

From today, we've decided to make our business membership free to local businesses across London. The reason is simple: we want to make it as easy as possible for local businesses to engage with customers in their communities.

We really want to support the small, unique businesses that make up our communities – the indepedent stores, the self employed, the service providers. We want to give them a tool to be able to talk to their communities; to have an open dialog so they can find, engage, and retain customers; to build trust. Elvis said it best: "We can't go on together with suspicious minds." In essence, we're encouraging businesses to use the kind of interactive, social features that registered users on YourLocal London get for free – and that's why we're removing the fee for membership.

I've actually used that Elvis quote because it's point 29 on the Cluetrain Manifesto – a call to action for businesses and corporations that was made way back in 1999. Fundamenally, the Cluetrain Manifesto was about how our ability to communicate faster than ever before would affect the marketplace for businesses. The first chapter of the Cluetrain book states:

"Markets are conversations. Trade routes pave the storylines. Across the millennia in between, the human voice is the music we have always listened for, and still best understand."

At least for big companies, it seems there may still be a fair way to go before Cluetrain's vision of the markets is realised. But for smaller, independent companies, we're confident YourLocal London can be a great way to engage the groundswell and build real relationships with their customers.

Let us know your thoughts.

Register here for free business membership

A Postcode Lottery: What Defines Where You Live?

I live in Herne Hill. It's a lovely place, and it's a nice manageable size. It's a place I can associate with.

We've had plenty of feedback to suggest that being able to find a site about your area of town - the little community or city village you're happy to call home - is something people really want to see. A community space just for Herne Hill, not all of Lambeth. Just for Balham or Wimbledon, rather than the whole of the South West. It's important that people find an area on our site that represents where they call home.

We've grappled with the best way to do it and chosen to divide the city up by postcode. We've effectively grouped and named postcodes – an approach that seems to work pretty well in London, where people often associate themselves with a postcode as much as a name for their part of town. (Just ask East 17.)

Of course, it isn't perfect. Should Pimlico should be part of Westminster? Where are the lines between Rotherhithe, Bermondsey and Borough? We're treading a line somewhere between what we really want to achieve and what we're able to implement.

The apparent lesson here is that there are no hard and fast rules about where the borders of the areas of our city lie. I might say a particular place is in Camden; you might call it Hampstead. I think I'm standing in Battersea; you're next to me but you've convinced you're in Clapham. So what can we do?

Well, this is where collective intelligence can help us. It's a fancy sounding phrase that simply means we can learn more together than we can individually. The boffins over at flickr sure know all about it. They've got lots and lots and lots of geotagged photos. People are taking pictures and giving the location and the name of the place they took them. They have over 100,000,000 geotagged photos on flickr. That's 100,000,000 times people have told them the name of a precise location in the world. Handily, that's enough to generate the countours of the areas of our world in the way we think about them ourselves.

A demo can explain this a little better. Tom Taylor has made a great little tool that plots this useful flickr information on a Google Map. We can now see the areas we live on a map - not defined by the post office or a cartographer, but by millions or people right across the world. Very neat.

Check out the maps here:
http://boundaries.tomtaylor.co.uk

Days Finally Numbered For IE6

People all over the place are dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 these days. It's encouraging stuff; supporting this old browser has stifled innovation for a while now. It really is old, too – 8 years old – which is a whole lifetime on the web. Even though an interesting study by Digg revealed lots of people would upgade but can't, and bureaucracy will hold some back for while longer, we may have reached a tipping point. It's market share has been dropping steadily for years, and YouTube and Facebook now on the bandwagon too.

Against that backdrop, it almost seems a shame to say that we do fully support IE6, for now. Our stats suggest it's hovering at around 15% of the market share, barely ahead of its younger brother IE8. It's a low enough percentage that we can start to consider ditching support for it soon, in order offer a better experience to the vast majority of our users.

If you are still running IE6, please upgrade if you can. We've got lots of cool stuff planned for YourLocal London in the coming months. We'd hate for you to miss out.

New Site Launched!

We're very pleased to announce our new site went live around 4pm today. It's the result of several months of intensive work at YLL Towers, and marks a subtle shift in direction for us. With this release we really wanted to focus more on the social side of local communities.

Rather than simply being a listings or directory site - which is often how we were seen, even if it wasn't how we saw ourselves - we wanted to give people a tool they could use to engage with the people in their community. People are what makes the community, and we wanted to make it really easy for them to interact. We've lowered the barrier to entry too - it's now really much easier to contribute by sharing your photos, videos, news, thoughts, events, stories - whatever it is that your local area means to you.

We've also added some cool new features , which we hope you will love - you can build you own personal calendar of events, follow your friends (or any interesting people) in a twitteresque way, and geotag your posts so you can see a map of what's going on right around where you live. You may notice a few areas of the site have disappeared too - principally the noticeboard and property sections. Again, this is to do with our focus on what we're calling 'sharing local life'. I'll touch on the reasons behind removing some features in another post in the next couple of weeks.

We'd love to get as much feedback as we can on the changes we've made. Let us know what works, and what doesn't.

Last but not least, a big shout to Ari, for his work on the design and information architechture. He did some really great work with the rather wooly brief we gave him, so he deserves to take credit for the pretty bits - I'm more than happy to take the blame for any ugly bits. We've gone for a design that's pretty minimalist - we hope the site stays out of your way, and just lets you get on with things. Again, let us know what you think.

The Pothole Paradox

Have you ever heard of the 'pothole paradox'? No? Well, neither did I until recently when I was reading this post by Steven Berlin Johnson from outside.in, which incidentally, is worth a read. Basically, it boils down to geotargetted content where the content I read or view may only be interesting to me and a few other people within spitting distance of me, because we all live on the same street. So, for example; a pothole being repaired on my road is of interest to me but obviously I wouldn't be remotely interested if it were two roads away, in fact, I couldn't care less.

We're all interested in news on all sorts of levels. This whole idea of going 'hyper local' is an interesting concept but a challenge to get right. It's about the people and the communities doing what they do best; sharing and contributing information so that people can eventually choose what content is interesting and relevant to them, whether that be by country, region, area or street.

The kindness of strangers

It's been an interesting few days... life can surprise you sometimes, quite often when you least expect it.

I've been trying to sort out some much needed childcare and have met all sorts of people over the past few days. One in particular was fantastic on paper and said all the right things but call it what you like, something about her was not quite right. As I was putting forward my argument about it being a simple case of a 'mother's instinct' to a rather bemused husband who thought she was great and no, this particular individual wasn't a 6ft amazon blonde, we got an email...

It was from a lady who had recently employed her and was trying to track her down with the help of the metropolitan police service. They wanted to find and arrest her for criminal damage, cruelty to children and assault, so as you can imagine, I was extremely relieved she had taken the time to get in touch. She had emailed everyone in the community who had advertised for help and warned them all. Now if that's not caring about your community and the people in it, then I don't know what it is.

All I can say is, thank you, thank you, thank you...

Our flex-abilities

Every time we meet with our editors, it amazes me just how much talent we have available to us in just one room. As we get to know them better, there is nothing that one of our editors hasn’t done it seems. I’d list them, but the list is endless...perhaps I’ll leave that for another time. Anyway, why aren’t there more opportunities for women to work flexibly around family commitments, it’s been fantastic for us. From talking to friends who have kids, the option to go back to work part-time is not always possible and for those that do, some (not all) have felt pressured to fit 5 days work in to 3 or 4. Invariably that still means making sacrifices on the home front.

From our experience, the commitment, enthusiasm and energy from our team is boundless and provided we do what we as a business have a duty to do, which is to work hard to maintain good working relationships, enjoy what we’re doing and get the best results, we wouldn’t change a thing. Why would we?