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:

1. People don’t live online. Re-localization is all about human interaction face to face. If you think community = online…ahem, get a life! MeetUp looks like a big winner in this environment. Mobile is a big deal, but you will be hard pressed to offer something more compelling than hitting autodial to tell your friend what cafe you are in.
2. Small business owners are traders. Trade with them. Buy from them or sell something to them that they can sell to their customers. I know that sounds kinda basic. To put it in fancier media/technology language, there is a value chain that leads from CPM to CPC to CPA to transaction fees. Ebay gets that and they are as mainstream as it gets.
3. When the local business wants to look at an online alternative to Yellow Pages/local paper, Craigslist is right there and virtually free and they have crossed the chasm. Count me a skeptic of the local ad market; Craigslist took the air out of that one.

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?

Image by StuffEyeSee

To address these cultural differences, the Mozilla Online in Beijing created Firefox China Edition (beta), a web browser designed with the needs of the Chinese web surfers in mind.

The browser contains several features which make it useful for Chinese users, including:

• New mouse-based controls for common functions that are often invoked by shortcut keys in North America and Europe, which isn't as common a habit of Chinese users
• Some Maxthon-parity features such as the ability to close a tab using double-click
• A drop-down button on the toolbar for launching common system utilities like a calculator, a notepad, a screenshot grabber and an image editor (editing images and pasting screenshots is a very common activity in China). Maxthon is usually included on the CD with the pirated copy of Windows XP that many Chinese have installed.
• A new sidebar called "Live Margins" which allows the user to drag any highlighted text to open a new drill-down search which will show you semantically relevant content as well as allow you to store pictures, videos and music you encounter so you can return to it or play it from the sidebar without interrupting your usual browsing tasks. (This sidebar is also available as the Juice addon - for more info, see our review).  

These features are all bundled together in the software known as Firefox China Edition, an optional download for Chinese web users. It is not intended to replace the version of Firefox shipped in China, only offer extra functionality if one so chooses to install it.

In a way, the China Edition reminds us a bit of Fashion Your Fox, the specialized collections of addons for the different types of web surfers. However, where Fashion Your Fox only provides links to addons, Firefox China Edition is the whole Firefox browser, preloaded with addons and extra features.

It will be interesting to see how many Chinese web surfers download this beta software. If successful, we may see more localized browsers appear in the future. 

Since the acquisition, Lifestream.fm has added several new features, including the following:

• Comments - You can now leave comments on items posted.
• Filters - Filter services and followers
• Search - Not just your stream, but all of Lifestream.fm for content and friends
• Import your friends from your address book
• See your last visitors displayed
• Extended profiles with contact info
• Delete posted items to your stream
• A German version supporting new German services

More importantly, perhaps, is the fact that Lifestream.fm now supports 56 services - compare that to FriendFeed's 41. Of course, we all know that number of services alone isn't enough - if it was, then Profilactic and their 186 services would be wildly successful. However, some of Lifestream.fm's services are those that are missing from FriendFeed - most notably Facebook, but also Xbox Live, Muxtape, eBay, and many other smaller services like We Heart It, iliketotallyloveit, and Wakoopa. They also offer you the option to add your YouTube Favs (favorited videos) or your YouTube Uploads or both.

The built-in filters let you block services or users from your "With Others" view of the lifestream, but they're nowhere near as specialized or granular as FriendFeed's "Hide" feature.

What is interesting is that Lifestream.fm is offering an AIR app right off the bat - a nod to this increasingly popular format (and source of my new addiction). An AIR app would be great if it worked, but unfortunately...

Yes, I spelled "sarahintampa" correctly...

Also, I had some issues with the import tool in Firefox (IE worked OK), but that may be a case of my finicky Firefox 3 installation :

German Version

It's possible then that the site's new direction is to establish themselves as the German FriendFeed. Part of their revamp has been the coding a German-language version with support for various German services and that's where Lifestream.fm may have a shot. Increasingly in the world of web apps, localized versions that range from blatant rip-offs to clones that offer new features, have a shot at success when they target a narrow market like those users in a particular country or who speak a certain language - look at China's Facebook clones, for example.

Beyond attracting a new German audience, though, Lifestream.fm still doesn't seem to hold enough appeal to attract the "casual" lifestreamer to their service - if there even is such a thing, considering that lifestreaming is still very much an early adopter toy. Only lifestreaming fanatics will sign up for another lifestreaming service besides FriendFeed and actively use it if it doesn't offer some incredible new features - like say, figuring out how to unlock Facebook's mini-feed or offering some killer new noise-reduction technology. In many cases, when you're competing against an already popular web app, you often have to innovate big or go local - otherwise the chance for success may be small.

Invites

That being said, if you are a lifestreaming fanatic, I acquired some invite codes to the closed beta (the site closed once acquired) if you want to check it out.They are available below:

de696f0f
291c139a
8de2cf3b
038f7c0f
93785ef7
c897cf1f
1ca40732
e4688d51
a8c91262
05419177

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:

1. People don’t live online. Re-localization is all about human interaction face to face. If you think community = online…ahem, get a life! MeetUp looks like a big winner in this environment. Mobile is a big deal, but you will be hard pressed to offer something more compelling than hitting autodial to tell your friend what cafe you are in.
2. Small business owners are traders. Trade with them. Buy from them or sell something to them that they can sell to their customers. I know that sounds kinda basic. To put it in more fancy media/technology language, there is a value chain that leads from CPM to CPC to CPA to transaction fees. Ebay gets that and they are as mainstream as it gets.
3. When the local business wants to look at an online alternative to Yellow Pages/local paper, Craigslist is right there and virtually free and they have crossed the chasm. Count me a sceptic on the local ad market; Craigslist took the air out of that one.

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?

Image by StuffEyeSee