After World War 2, America built the infrastructure to deliver mass produced products, by mass transit for mass markets. We consumed along the arteries of this infrastructure, in supermarkets, fast food chains and airport malls. We have now passed the high water mark of this long distance, mass culture; the trend now is towards “re-localization”, where we are less dependent on the two dominant grids of the 20th Century - electric grid and interstate highways - as we rely increasingly on the digital grid/cloud.
People increasingly look for reasons to avoid traveling, knowing we will get crowds, intrusive security, a bland sameness everywhere, crumbling infrastructure that could be dangerous and to top it all a smidgeon of guilt about our carbon footprint. When travel looks like fun, it is “off the beaten track”, in some place that does not look like everywhere else, a genuinely local place.
Living “off the grid” was once a dream for a few wild hippies, toking in yurts in the Mojave desert. Now we can see three “straws in the wind” that indicate that this is turning mainstream:
1. Silicon Valley A List VCs are financing the solar energy products to enable all of us to cut off our dependency on the electricity grid.
2. The work from home generation increasingly takes a world without commuting to Dilbert cubicles for granted; reducing our dependency on highways and mass transportation. In that more local world, we can get about by foot, bicycle or maybe electric car; we are also more likely to interact with and care about local shopkeepers and other suppliers.
3. Consumers increasingly value local and hand-made as special, for which they are willing to pay a premium; consumers want the opposite of mass-produced. We increasingly distrust the industrial food that comes from the Meatrix and a book about sustainable agriculture hits the bestseller lists. Local food is the new black, “better than organic“.
Taken together, these trends are being referred to as re-localization. An alternative name is Local 2.0. The difference is subtle but real.
Local 2.0 is clearly Web 2.0 type thinking. The big focus is on location based services. The classic use case is a traveler, a stranger in a strange land who has just landed and wants to find something or somebody (who might help them find something). As we all rush around the country/world pitching to clients/investors/partners or hanging out at cool un-conferences, that is an important use case; but it is different from Re-localization.
Re-localization is about locals. It is about people who like being in one place and interacting with neighbors. This does not make it a closed world. Local shopkeepers/restaurants/cafes welcome the stranger/traveler/tourist with their credit card. Realtors, plumbers and all kinds of small businesses welcome the newcomer, who may put down roots here and become a regular customer.
In Web 1.0, these local businesses were viewed as roadkill. Everything would be ordered online and delivered by air and trucks from giant automated warehouses. Oops, lousy economics; plus increasing consumer push-back. So now Web 2.0 start-ups want to “partner” with these local businesses.
“Partner” is a term we fling about carelessly in technology/media circles; it is a thoroughly devalued term. Use it with a local shopkeeper and she will ask you how many dollars you plan to invest with her in this new business that you will jointly own.
What we really mostly mean is “we would like to sell you some advertising”. After delivering your pitch for a paradigm-changing local ad service, you will hear something about Yellow Pages or Classified Ads in the local paper; well you would hear that if you were actually in conversation. Many will tell you they don’t bother - “the locals already know me”. Others will say they have always used the local paper/directory “because Harry is a great guy, no idea if it works, but don’t plan to change”. So then you switch your pitch to something about visitors and the pitch degenerates into something pretty marginal.
Selling to real small businesses at a local level, means having a little cheat sheet to remind you of three basic facts:
Here is the little secret. Local business people are plenty smart (even if they don’t know what Drupal is) and the Web just made them smarter. They can get together with other small businesses to compete more effectively against the Fortune 500 behemoths who turned America into a shopping mall. They will use the Net to trade with their peers; enable that in some way and you may have a winner.
The Net is also critical to re-localization because it brings the “distant independent digital worker” who relies on broadband and smart tools to communicate with colleagues/partners/clients globally. They bring new revenue into the local economy.
What do you think? Do you like your local bookshop or are you Amazon only? If you ran a local small business, what Net based service would you find most useful?
Comments
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I love living in a small community because I like the interaction.
And I quickly settled into a routine of the shops I visit and the shops I don't.
I visit shops where my initial problems got solved - where the owner stepped out, understood my problem, and fixed it - often without making much profit. If they were indifferent to my needs, or served me absentmindedly, I didn't go back or I go back only when I am desperate.
So how could they use web2.0? I would like them to communicate with me by 2.0. I would like to see the special of the day, etc. The reality is that I know many of my neighbours don't use internet much.
Some shops could use internet in the shop. The local Oxfam bookshop could double as an Amazon ordering service and collect the commission from Amazon. Dome of the 'fashion' shops could do similarly. This is a small town 15 miles from a major mall. The deli might benefit from information on food markets 100 miles away in London. The deli that does not do so well might benefit from becoming a food delivery service - this is also a dormitory town. Putting together the best of what is available from all the shops might be viable. etc.
This was a good post. I think you have pinpointed an important issue.
Posted by: Jo | March 9, 2008 4:36 AMI have to both agree and disagree. First we are more grid dependent then ever as the lack of wind in Texas recently showed or the cutting of undersea cables demonstrated. Trucks still need to drive on roads, containers get shipped by trains, which also carry the raw materials that are used in many of our consumables.
While I may like custom local things there is a large body of evidence that I am not in the majority. Walmart recently released robust earnings. Clearly people in the last quarter consumed lots of cookie cutter made in China goods.
After the initial angst about plastic toys made China that contained harmful chemicals I predicted and bet that companies that made and sold those toys in the US would get clobbered. I was wrong. People consumed about the same amount of Barbies, GI Joes and Legos as last year.
Now I like Etsy and a couple of my friends even use it to sell items that they make only. But most of that is still shipped so the UPS guy is more important than ever.
I have serious questions about the scalability of local products. If everyone was to start wanting to shop a Whole Foods they would need to vastly increase their supply which would mean importing food from a wider geographic area. As long as the population is concentrated in cities making ultra local food production scale will be difficult at best.
I also question whether people will in the end derive as much economic satisfaction by buying more expensive local goods that are basically replacements for mass manufactured goods. Many local goods are more expensive than their mass manufactured counterparts. In a world where people don't even watch the food that they eat and obesity runs at 30% I have to question at which point the local market will be saturated.
Those are my rambling thoughts about the topic. If you read it I hope you liked it.
Steve
Posted by: Steve Severance | March 9, 2008 9:41 AMPassion-driven hackery plus an incredibly deep and wide stack is letting small groups mow down their problems. And that "stack" is not just technical; it's Ruby on Rails, REST, and cloud computing as much as well-written docs, IM, and coffee shop wifi.
Results bleed into fields like physical localization (anyone with an browser and two eyes can buy CPC ads), site localization (crowdsourced translations), and even education (open standards for school assignments).
As to Amazon or local: both, often concurrently. Utopian Amazon would charge a $0.50 transaction fee to tell me where I can pick up a local used copy of the book I'm browsing.
Posted by: Troy | March 9, 2008 10:18 AMI want to say - We R Local 2.0
Our community group Project Lyttelton is the epitomy of local ...but... our Web tools are not! We use predominantly remote I.T. servers & databases. Ping our IP address or consider our local project featured on Relocalize that is running Timebank software served as far as is possible from our locale.
We do not feel completely secure with remote web2.0 adoption and are dissatisfied with web1.0 limitations. In response our community is developing our own IT infrastructure. We are also using non web realities to rethink the role of economics in living, this is beginning to impact our deployment of networked technologies.
We think the key to building Local2.0 is Local Knowledge based on participation and collaboration particularly with people inhabiting our immediate geography - but not exclusively.
Posted by: Chris Twemlow | March 9, 2008 10:54 AMSo ... solar generated electricity is being off-the-grid? Come on, let's get real. The distribution grid is exactly the same. Now, the Local market is again blossoming because the need for local services is real and VERY necessary. Search engines have recognize it for years and companies like SpotRunner directly cater to it.
The more technology develops the more our dependency increases. It is a never-ending cycle. It is an 10000++ addiction. To deny it or try to get off of it is impossible and undesirable. It permeates all aspects of life. It is how it is.
http://www.fabianschonholz.com/2008/02/10/the-end-of-progress/
Posted by: Fabian Schonholz | March 9, 2008 7:25 PMI think you are right, although I have nothing against big. If small can compete, and they will, that's good. I do think that people will begin spreading out from large metropolitan areas, but I think we will still be connected online, as well as people making local face-to-face connections.
To me, the "partnerships" are not direct, monetary partnerships, but simply connections in a network, and some big web 2.0 players will be good connections, some will be useless connections -- it all depends on how the connections are mutually beneficial.
Say a small town realtor getting ready for new arrivals into the area -- the re-localization -- could benefit from a web 2.0 connection that recognizes movement to that area and refers information. The small local realtor will still be competing against other realtors, and if population grows, even moreso, so connections with web 2.0 might be useful to be the go-to realtor in Smallville.
Posted by: Mike Farmer | March 10, 2008 7:18 AMHere in the UK at least there is already a plethora of companies trying to sell 'localised' services - basically trying to sell localised based advertising. And they are all extremely poor, asking for ridiculously high fees for advertising that delivers zero value to the local business. The companies such as the yellow pages shot themselves in the foot a while ago now, and can't see them recovering. They decided to charge to much for advertising, so as options like Google PPC have come along, many businesses have stopped advertising in yellow pages, then as a customer you find yellow pages doesn't contain enough useful listing, so you give up on them and use google to search, and its all been a downward spiral.
There are effective things already availale, mainly google. Type in 'butcher', 'Italian restaurant' or whatever and your suburb or postcode, and you get a pretty good list of local results. And people are already using Google for searching anyway.
I could see a place for local community forum style sites, where as a business you can post special offers, make announcements etc, and that would include community information, a list of local events coming up, news from the council on road closures etc. This is starting to be done by some local based newspapers, but improvements could still be made.
Posted by: Robert | March 10, 2008 8:12 AMYes I agree about yellow pages - if people stop advertising in them because they are too expensive, then its no good going to them as they will be short listed.
Posted by: timlee | March 11, 2008 12:28 AM