Philly Future - History and Future
September 12, 2007
Our Mission
Philly Future is an open resource for learning about and sharing the sites, sounds,
joys, concerns, and news of the Philadelphia region.
We aggregate a group of independent, trusted bloggers who publish in our region,
and we empower discussion among them. In many ways, we are utilizing a wider,
more diverse reporting base than all of the local media companies because our
bloggers come from various neighborhoods, socio-economic backgrounds, ideologies
and industries.
Our online community tools enable the citizens of this city to share local and national
stories with one another and with the world, thus weaving together an incredible,
collective tapestry of knowledge and experience that transcends racial, economic,
and political differences.
Ultimately the goal of Philly Future is to enhance the quality of life in our region,
enabling its citizenry to make new, meaningful virtual connections that translate into
progress in our physical communities.
Our Approach
Philly Future helps users discover what independent voices across our region are
talking about on any given day.
Hundreds of stories flow through our aggregator each day, as do stories by a number
of users participating on the site directly. Out of this second channel of participation,
a dedicated team of volunteer editors selects individual stories and highlights them
on the home page.
This participation, when indexed, provides the source of a powerful, relevant local
search that exposes what Philadelphians are talking at any one moment in time.
During special events, Philly Future helps focus regional online coverage of specific
news stories by encouraging users to mark their content with specific tags, which can
then be aggregated into summary stories. In addition, our volunteers and a number
of participants regularly look for related commentary and post relevant links. This
enables us to pull participation into special collections, and special views, that are
not only hard to find elsewhere, but also completely dependent on the organic and
unique community that the site has helped create.
For example, Philly Future aggregated content during Live8, and we featured
traditional media, blogs and Podcasts and independent publishers from our regional
community. We also aggregated multimedia content from Flickr and from
Technorati. In addition, Philly Future had a press-credentialed volunteer working at
the scene. This enabled Philly Future to provide startling images and coverage of the
event from a ground-level, citizen’s perspective as we culled reporting and other
content from around the web.
In addition, we regularly highlight outstanding individual bloggers in our region and
promote them as “Featured Bloggers” on our home page. Featured Bloggers receive
additional exposure on our site through a prominent block that displays their latest
posts and shares them with the community. We encourage other blogs to link to the
featured blog, and to discuss it. This helps to highlight individual voices that might
otherwise be missed.
Philly Future is not in competition with our local news media. Rather, we work with it,
operating on a different, but complementary, wavelength that draws together all
forms of media in the Philadelphia region. As such, Philly Future has also been
featured in and linked to on such sites as the Philadelphia Daily News and
Philadelphia Inquirer.
We believe that Philly Future has found a hybrid approach that prevents it from
becoming either a walled garden or a pure hub. Our goal is to supplement the work
of the city’s journalists with additional content from underreported neighborhoods
and from the residents who make up the fabric of Greater Philadelphia.
Our Revenue Streams
It has yet to be decided if Philly Future is to be a non-profit or for-profit entity.
Having been run as a labor of love by its hosts and volunteers for years, it has only
one source of income: an advertising network of independent blogs managed using
Blogads.com. The so-far undeveloped potential for additional revenue streams
provides ample opportunity for local advertisers to a growing local community.
The question for Philly Future itself is whether the presence of additional revenue
streams would adversely affect the sense of community that the site has generated.
This community is our greatest asset; it is one we are anxious to protect.
Whatever model is chosen to fund Philly Future, it must be coupled with
transparency and—if a profit-seeking model is chosen—revenue sharing.
The Philly Future community is uniquely driven by trust. Any future financial
decisions will be dependent on models that enable us to sustain the level of trust we
have established with our community. Those decisions will be published and
discussed at Philly Future.
Our Future
Services that are empowered by the distributed, participatory nature of the web
provide a roadmap for Philly Future’s growth.
Participatory websites, such as Slashdot, Google, Amazon.com, eBay, Blogger,
Craigslist, and Technorati, show that participatory services that integrate two-way
communication into their design can provide the essential ingredients for any
successful online web effort.
To that end, Philly Future looks forward to implementing the following list of phased
functionality upgrades, to serve its mission. These upgrades will require finding new
resources and expertise, either through volunteerism or consulting:
Phase 1
1. Expanding the volunteer team to include additional members who know the
city and its subject matter, and who can encourage and discover related
conversations taking place and share them.
2. Redesigning our site to emphasize the community and utility aspects of the
service, and to simplify the user interface.
3. Further encouraging in-person reporter/ citizen meetups and get-togethers
across the region.
4. Expanding educational resources to help new users learn how to participate
online.
5. Improving the management and awareness of the Philly Ad Network.
6. Working with both Journalism and Business college communities to provide
opportunities to explore the participatory media and the Web. Enabling both
to use Philly Future as a test bed for ideas.
7. Working with local non-profit communities to enable those with limited means
to explore and utilize participatory media.
Phase 2
1. Enabling control over aggregation preferences by users via their accounts (a
manual process at the current time) .
2. Automatic pinging of blog update services whenever an individual participant
updates.
3. Improving services to flag inappropriate content.
4. Rewarding and encouraging participation, sharing and linking. Rewards can be
in the form of additional trust and capability to help manage the service. The
service, in effect, is run by its membership.
5. Enabling users to vote on content (aggregated and content posted to the
service) flowing through the site for promotion to the home page.
6. Providing views that enable users to see which users have posted the most
content, the highest rated content, and the most shared content.
Phase 3
1. Integration with Google Maps, Google Local, Meetup.com, and Upcoming.org.
2. Geolocating participation aggregated into the service and posted to the
service. This will further enable Philly Future to help bring the issues and
solutions posted on our site into Philadelphia’s physical communities.
3. Providing Philadelphia residents, on a neighborhood-by-neighborhood basis,
tools to inspect the records of and interact with their elected representatives.
Phase 4
1. Empowering users to create new sections of the site, via tagging, that can
provide a regional view into related conversations and content. Sections
should provide widgets that independent bloggers can host on their sites.
They should provide OPML files so that relevant feeds can be shared.
2. Providing a Memeorandum-like service that provides an algorithmic window
into what the region is talking about.
3. Determining microformats that can empower individuals to reach a wider
audience through services like Philly Future, and empowering them.
Our History
The following history is told from the perspective of Philly Future’s primary host, Karl
Martino.
Philly Future launched December 1999 originally to serve three purposes:
1. I wanted to give something back to the city. In my late teens and early
twenties I experienced homelessness first hand. I had the opportunity to
teach myself software engineering and built a career around it. The 90s in
Philadelphia was a time of great excitement about the future and I owe many
people a debt of gratitude for their faith in my capabilities.
2. I believed—and still believe—in the potential of tools that empower people to
communicate and connect to make a difference in our lives, in our
communities, and in the world. It was primarily through the Web that I was
able to learn the practice of software engineering.
3. I wanted to provide support for Dan Gillmor, who worked as a columnist for
the San Jose Mercury News/Knight Ridder Newspapers. Gillmor had been
running an eJournal with a content management system developed by
UserLand Software (Manila). I was a software engineer for the Philadelphia
Inquirer and Daily News, which was also owned by Knight Ridder Newspapers,
and I was a known blogger within the company. I had prior experience with
UserLand software, and launching Philly Future on Manila enabled me to
assist him.
Philly Future has evolved much over the years.
In its original incarnation, Philly Future was a one person effort. I would scour local
newspapers, looking for interesting bits of news to share. When I got into work, I
would hunt down URLs and post them.
Over time, I asked for additional help to come on board. But the process was slow –
it was difficult to attract people to contribute from a pool of people – fellow bloggers
– who had their own efforts to maintain.
The year following September 11, 2001, we would see how blogging, online
publishing, and social networking empowered untold thousands to reach out and
communicate on a scale never before witnessed. Indeed, social media would prove to
make a difference in many people’s lives, if not in our communities, if not in our
nation, in our world. It was during this time that Philly Future went on a two year
hiatus.
In late 2003 I began to experiment with blog aggregation and syndication utilizing
RSS. I had plenty of experience with blog syndication and aggregation, having
published a feed for My Netscape back in 1999 having to do with the Kosovo war.
A question began to emerge – instead of attempting to encourage people to write for
Philly Future, could there be some value in highlighting what was already out there –
the existing and growing local online community? Could I help give voice to those not
typically heard in the larger blogophere? Early efforts involved variants of publishing
a page of headlines from recently updated blogs.
Dave Winer and the Dean Presidential campaign had used aggregators to connect
communities. I wanted to do the same on a geographical basis.
Simple aggregation, however, isn’t enough to create a community – I realized that I
had to speak personally to other bloggers, as a blogger, as a person who cared about
this city. I wanted to create a community, not just a collection of feeds. I moved to
personally highlight bloggers I thought were exceptional and to point out stories they
posted that I thought should be shared.
To grow the effort, I contacted various local bloggers and asked them to get
involved. I had to make the case for something that was just coming into existence:
the creation of regionally-oriented, independent, virtual online community.
The latest version of the site runs on the Drupal platform; like Slashdot, it enables a
group of volunteers and its two hosts to promote selected stories to the home page
and empowering anyone to participate. Philly Future is managed by two individuals,
Karl Martino and Howard Hall.
In addition Philly Future has a small, but dedicated, volunteer team. Each member
has a deep knowledge of Philadelphia, and contributes content on a regular or semi-
regular basis. All are important blogging names in their own right.
Mentions:
http://www.scripting.com/1999/04.html
http://www.scripting.com/1999/12/28.html
http://radio.weblogs.com/0107946/stories/2004/12/30/karlMartinophillyFuture.html
Further Information:
http://www.phillyfuture.org
http://www.phillyfuture.org/team
