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Here I am, a week into my new digs and I still don’t know much about the town I’m living in. Sure, it’s old and I live in the shadow of the Bunker Hill Monument, but what makes Charlestown tick?
Thankfully my neighbors were able to tell me about garbage, recycling and where to park my car, but this got me thinking about Welcome Wagon, which back in the day would stop by and give you a gift basked, coupons and a warm welcome to a new neighborhood.
In this day and age, and me being a renter at the moment (nobody is going to waste a perfectly good basket of fruit on a renter), I of course looked to the web for my local information.
Sadly, the Charlestownonline, the only site I’ve been able to find is not very healthy. Lots of broken links, bulletin board registration is down and there’s not much in the way of content on the site.
Welcome wagon say it produces and mails millions of printed pieces in-house, within their brand new facility. What a colossal waste of money and trees.
With all the focus on local information (hyperlocal is really a ridiculous term but it makes for a good headline), why isn’t there a national resource for those newly relocated? I went to the Welcome Wagon website and searched for pizza in 02129 and it gave me the results I am looking for, but I expected more for such a self-admittedly technical and web-savvy company.
There are several Boston-area startups like CitySquares that I found out about at Webinno but it’s going to take years for them to get the traction they need to succeed nationally. All the hyperlocal sites have no idea how difficult it is to have feet on the street, it’s the #1 problem they all seem to run into which is why the old school versions from Microsoft and AOL are still reasonably successful.
Citysquares, for example, founded right here in Boston, doesn’t even have Charlestown listed as a neighborhood. Backfence expired recently burning through $3 million in the process. I or nobody I asked had heard of it until today, which is part of the reason they failed. There are options out there like Yelp and to some extent Judy’s Book which sadly looks like it’s shifted focus to become a giant ugly coupon website.
I’ll continue to look into local resources, but I have a felling neighbors are the best way to go when it comes to learning about a new neighborhood.
Time to plan that housewarming party.
