Uncategorized - by Patrick Thornton on Friday, March 28, 2008 9:31 - View Comments

Willow Glen 2.0 – Proof of the Local Ning Network

Can Ning, or even beat blogging for that matter, work at a local level?

Check out Willow Glen 2.0.

The site is built to serve the residents of Willow Glen, a neigborhood of San Jose. At the helm of this network isn’t a reporter – just a local community member. But he does admit that it takes some grooming. The founder, Ryan Kuder, also told me how this site got started: As a community email thread.

But Ryan wanted to take the email to the next level – letting people contact each other instantly and individually – hence the ’2.0′ part of the name. Ryan also mentioned that this community was rather quite until it hit a threshold: Somewhere around 150-200 people is the tipping point where you get lots of activity – before that you’d end up with general silence with outbursts of activity here and there.

I find Willow Glen a great example of a few things.
1. Ning and community working at a local level.
2. The benefit of making your network open. Having a ‘beat blog’ or a ‘network’ doesn’t necessarily imply you have to horde them.


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About BeatBlogging.org

BeatBlogging.org was a grant-funded journalism project that studied how journalists used social media and other Web tools to improve beat reporting. It ran for about two years, ending in the fall of 2009.

New content is occasionally produced here by the this project's former editor Patrick Thornton. The site is still up and will remain so because many journalists and professors still use and link to the content. BeatBlogging.org offers a fascinating glimpse into the former stages of journalism and social media. Today it's expected that journalists and journalism organization use social media, but just a few years ago that wasn't the case.

About the Author of this post
Patrick Thornton is the editor and lead writer of BeatBlogging.Org. He is @pwthornton on Twitter.