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January 26, 2007

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 and why your city needs it to attract the creative class (2 of 2)

Continuing the previous entry introducing the two economy-generating factors, Web 2.0 with the creative class, what happens when you combine the two in your city?

Let's take the most popular Web 2.0 website as an analogy...

Imagine the rabid popularity and obsession young adults spend on MySpace, but applied to job-creating entrepreneurs in a single walkable district in your town. Now, people may spend inordinate amounts of time meeting new people by commenting on the blogs, pictures and videos, especially on the MySpace profiles with the most interesting content (ie bands and musicians pretty much all have a MySpace page now). However, they occupy even more of their time and effort in MySpace groups (the most popular averaging well over 100,000 members), discussing, say, the last episode of American Idol or any of the aforementioned artists... or shall we say... creatives?

So you see, what's really driving MySpace are... creative people making money, such as TV producers and professional artists. Applying Web 2.0 to the creative class in a cool town would be the equivalent of establishing such a social network to enable groups to collaborate around local business and culturally creative ideas rather than national ones, and allowing them to meet face-face in the buzz of social neighborhood coffeehouses and cafes rather than chat rooms.

The University of Maryland has a similar environment where the students are so juiced by the entrepreneurial collaboration among their peers, they're known to have too much fun to sleep.

However, just the same as is happening with MySpace, you can kill it with too many national corporations/chains that don't really speak the local language.

Image: Soho, London

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January 25, 2007

Web 2.0

Web 2.0 and why your city needs it to attract the creative class (1 of 2)

First of all, what is Web 2.0? In a nutshell, Web 1.0 was commerce. Web 2.0 is people.

Its wikipedia (a Web 2.0 product) definiton: perceived or proposed second generation of Internet-based services - such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies (don't worry, we'll go through these) - that emphasize online collaboration and sharing among users.

The creative class is well documented, as well as its connection to job growth. These are the innovators (ie the Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Richard Bransons) that start new companies and invent must-have products, and it happens in regions of intense creative collaboration (ie Silicon Valley, London, etc.) Introducing them to Web 2.0 is like giving Lance Armstrong a motorcycle at the Tour de France.

Before we blend the two potent elements, a little summary of what makes up Web 2.0:

Wikis - Imagine if a community of regular users (ie 'pro-amatuers') could add, remove and edit much of the content of a website rather than its owners - in fact, they monitor one another (like eBay). That defines the success of Wikipedia.

Social networking sites - Building community on the web by having individuals define themselves and their interests, skills, objectives, forming the basis to make connections with others. You've heard of MySpace. There are now hundreds, growing toward thousands.

Folksonomies - A taxonomy is a classification system, so a folksonomy is a one based on people's personal content, like and Flickr, even YouTube and eBay to some degree.

Then there are blogs, discussion boards, and all those user reviews on Amazon by people you don't know from Adam, but read anyway. Overall, if you're a true Web 2.0 user, your email inbox would start to get lonely (which to many, is a great thing).

For a more detailed summary, check out this graphic and this summary by Tim O'Reilly, the originator of the term Web 2.0.

Tomorrow, what happens when you combine the two in a city...

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January 24, 2007

Cool Places in Flickr

Reader Q&A: "Can you give sources for your photos? I always love 'em and want to follow up."

Let's do one better. Why don't we all pool our most inspiring photos, the ones that inspire us to say, "Wow, I wish that was in my neighborhood!". There's no better source for this of course than Flickr, and coincidentally, we've just set up a group photo pool called Cool Places right here.

If you're not a Flickr user, it's quick, free and painless to sign up. If you are a Flickr member, just click on the Join this group? link on the group page and share your photos! It's highly preferable to write a short story behind the photo (I've got a headstart with over 900 on this website :)... and also, that your image passes the "Wow, I wish that was in my neighborhood!" test. It's just as valuable to recruit other people who have such photos you've no doubt come across. It's also important to assure you that the photos have to meet a certain quality benchmark. By the way, image sharing is also a standard beta community tool.

Also, surely I'll be requesting use of your photo on this website as well, with due credit. Really, that's what open source is all about - there's just too much undiscovered gold out there, too many extroardinary places that strike emotional chords, not to be discovered.

See the new Share Photos link in the upper right column.

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January 23, 2007

Beerline B, Milwaukee

Cities prosper with open-source approach to development

Continuing yesterday's entry, what happens when a city takes a more open-source approach to real estate development?

New Urban News features two such stories in one article, More developers, better results: A lesson in orchestration.

In each example, the city established an RFP competition for multiple sites, selecting multiple developers. The primary reason? Diversity and variety, which speaks to authenticity, which is paramount to a creative class that dispels much of new urbanism on account of sterility. In the case of the Holiday neighborhood on a former drive-in theater site in Boulder, CO, the housing authority (the city entity that owned the site) also accepted a smaller financial return than would have been demanded by a master developer, resulting in more attainable homes, another key creative class requirement.

For the Beerline B industrial riverfront district in Milwaukee, WI, the city created a competition for parcels as small as feasible, (often under two acres) to encourage multiple developers. Why? They felt (and they were right) that the development would happen faster than with a single master developer, and resulted in more innovative designs and variety of residences. This interactive map displays the different properties in Beerline. This, by the way, is how we would display a multi-site 'cool town'-oriented RFP for your city, with a 'cool town'-oriented $150M real estate equity fund standing by... if needed.

Was the 'open source' program successful financially? Take Beerline for instance. With $200 million invested in an undesirable area since 1999, over 1000 residential units built or approved, and $25M in TIFs (project-generated taxes reinvested into the project), you be the judge.

Image: Beerline B, Milwaukee, WI

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January 22, 2007

Mavericks at Work

There's hidden gold in your city

The talent and assets (or at least access to them) for building places that raise the benchmark for quality of life and economic vitality already exist in your city. If you're skeptical, maybe this story from Mavericks at Work will make you a believer...

Entrepreneur Rob McEwen purchased what many considered a fool's decision - a 55,000-acre gold mine with no gold. Why did he buy it? Because it went cheap, and it was adjacent to a very productive mine.

A couple of frustrating years later, McEwen attended a conference on information technology and learned about Linux and open source development (the foundation for CoolTown's beta community). There he realized people didn't have to work for his company in order to work with his company, "All of a sudden a light went on. It was like a flash: this is the template I've been looking for!"

McEwen rushed home and immediately used the internet as the primary tool to establish a community of competition and collaboration that published all of his company's mine data and invited professional and amateur scientists and engineers from anywhere in the world to submit plans on how to find gold. A half a million $ was to be divided among twenty-five semifinalists and three finalists. As is typical, his colleagues thought he was nuts to open up the company's research to the public.

Long story short, as a direct result of open source development, McEwen's company, Goldcorp, has since stockpiled more gold than the central banks of 45 of the world's countries, including Canada.

The moral of the story is that your city is a sleeping gold mine. The big question is, are its government and business leaders open-minded enough to go open-source to find it? Here's a starter, and read tomorrow's entry on how two cities are taking this approach successfully.

ps If you don't want to read the book, click here for a manifesto in 8 pages.

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