Zipcode Village Blog

Inside and Outside Your Village

July 17th, 2007

One of the biggest decisions we faced during the early stages of planning ZipcodeVillage.com was how much access users should have to villages other than their own. We felt strongly that in Version 1.0, we needed to preserve the sanctity and integrity of a village. In other words, the design and technical system should keep posts and interaction happening inside a zip code. Otherwise, the core concept of tying together a zip code and a village would fall apart.

That’s all well and good. But it’s obvious from our first users that posting to a “forum of one” produces ghost towns, rather than villages. So, we’re now going back to the drawing board and thinking about how to make our users’ homepages come to life with links to posts in other villages, and thus allow a national community of people interested in building communities to collaborate with each other–and to build up their own community connections at the same time. We will begin the process of aggregating all kinds of other news and resources about zip codes that are available on the web.

P.S. We’re creating a flyer in pdf form that any user can download and tack up at local hangouts and telephone poles, and ready to drop in mailboxes on your street. Contact us if you would like one of these flyers.

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Spread the Word

July 9th, 2007

The key to making Zipcode Village work is to let your neighbors know about the site. One of our first users, doulagrammie from 32951 has exactly the right idea. See what doulagrammie is doing to spread the word.

Hi fellow Melbourne Beachersâ€¦ Iâ€™ll be the first to post here. Iâ€™ve lived in Melbourne Beach for 20 years. I love it here. Several years ago I became active in a local Freecycle Group. Iâ€™ve had so much fun and many good feelings for keeping items OUT of the landfill and giving my items to our neighbors who will find them useful.

I came across this website, Zipcode village, and thought it might be a way for us to pull together to share news, happenings, etc. in our wonderful town. Letâ€™s really reach out to one another.

Iâ€™m sending this along to all friends and neighbors to encourage them to join togetherâ€¦.please forward this to your buddies and friends from Mel Bch.

Your neighbor, doulagrammie

PS. the sign up process is fast and easyâ€¦you donâ€™t need to use your name!

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We launched!

July 7th, 2007

On July 2, 2007, we sent an announcement about Zipcode Village to subscribers of the HybridCars.com newsletterâ€”the first time we invited the world to take a look, sign up, and begin using the site. It was exciting and nerve-wracking because we didn’t know what would happen. Would everything work?

The goal of the siteâ€”to help people build connections in their neighborhoodâ€”is a noble one. And we put tons of effort into the project and we think we’re on the right track, but ultimately it’s all about the users. What would our first visitors and user think? All and all, the feedback from email (and from a few bloggers) was excellent. Amanda from Enviroblog wrote:

You mean it’s about… meeting people? Like, in person? What a radical idea!

Well, by the end of the day, more than 200 people had signed up for accounts and about 50 posts had been created. Also, a set of about dozen (mostly minor) bugs were reported. We’re busy fixing them as soon as we can.

Five days later, we’re nearly at 300 users, mostly folks who have come to their zip code and made a single post. That brings us to the biggest early challenge: encouraging users to reach out to their neighbors and let them know about Zipcode Village.

The whole point is to build connections between people. It doesn’t make sense for our early adopters to sit alone inside their Zipcode Villages. So stay tuned as we provide better tools on the site and more information in this blog about grassroots efforts to make our Zipcode Villages thrive.Â A big thanks to our early adopters!Â We won’t let you down.

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