ActiveRain, a site that describes itself as “a free online community for real estate professionals designed to help them promote and grow their business,” has launched a new site called Localism. Localism describes itself as the “world’s most complete neighborpedia,” and the front page invites users to “Go Hyper Local!”
It is the latest entrant into what seems to be an already over-served online market. For people that want so-called “hyper local” content, there are already a ton of choices out there including sites like Yelp, StreetAdvisor, and outside.in. Also, because it’s so trivially simple to set up a free blog, many neighborhoods have dedicated blogs that are just a simple Google search away.
John Cook put out a pair of stories about Localism today, one on the P-I and one on his P-I blog. Here’s a brief excerpt:
Of course, since real estate professionals are doing most of the writing there will also be a fair share of stories about buying and selling homes.
Initially, the site — segmented into various communities by state, county, city and neighborhood — will be authored by some of the 90,000 real estate professionals on ActiveRain. But over time, ActiveRain founder Jonathan Washburn said it plans to open the platform to everyone. He also envisions people creating new online communities around schools, subdivisions or churches.
Since John Cook covered the basics of Localism’s press release in his stories, I thought I’d take a different approach. Let’s compare Localism to what I think is their toughest competition: local blogs. For this contest, I picked three (update: four) Seattle-area neighborhoods: two three are currently served by local blogs, and one is not. Let’s see how Localism compares…
