Today, Active Rain unveils the New and totally revamped Localism, "The World's Most Complete Neighborpedia," with new content, features and design!
The New Localism
ActiveRain, real estate's leading online community, has released a dramatically updated version of its Localism neighborhood portal, where local residents, potential residents, and area merchants connect. Billed as the "World's Most Complete Neighborpedia," Localism already contains over 200,000 articles and photos. The site opened up to contributions from ActiveRain members today and will be accepting contributions from other local merchants and consumers beginning in August.
"No one has captured the essence and flavor of local communities online on a large scale," said Jonathan Washburn, CEO of Active Rain. "All the data points, pie charts, graphs and widgets in the world can't tell the complete story of a place. It takes content from the people who live and work there – which we have in abundance – to bring things to life. There are plenty of local review sites out there, but we're going beyond that to capture the full range of things that make communities unique."
The site, which covers the entire United States, allows users to go well beyond the typical city or ZIP code level to explore specific niche communities. Moreover, Localism manages to the avoid the proverbial "chicken and egg" dilemma that many who have attempted to enter this space have faced, due to its vast store of existing content and already impressive search engine performance, which helped deliver over 280,000 visits in June.
Key Attributes
Some of the key attributes to Localism include:
"Top Neighbors". The top content contributors for each neighborhood are ranked and displayed as the "Top Neighbors" for their community.
Unique photographs. Localism features over 100,000 photos of communities that cannot be found on any other site.
Human editorial involvement. ActiveRain editors will manually review every single article to ensure that they add value to their intended community and audience.
Community sponsorships. Real estate professionals and other business people may purchase sponsorships of one or more communities within Localism for a small monthly fee.
"Our growing Active Rain community of over 95,000 real estate professionals knows America's communities down to the last speed bump and corner store," said ActiveRain community evangelist Bob Stewart. "Their collective knowledge provides us with a tremendous jump start in providing relevant, useful information and will be built upon by the contributions of consumers and merchants nationwide."
"Localism converges art and function, consumer and professional, neighbor and seeker," concludes Washburn. "This space has seen its share of failures and we've taken those to heart in creating a destination that includes all the key elements needed for true online community."
About ActiveRain
Active Rain is a real estate technology company based in the Pacific Northwest founded in 2003. The company launched its online community for real estate professionals in June of 2006 and quickly established it as the leading real estate social network. The community currently has over 95,000 members. The company released Localism in beta in 2007. The company, which has just nine employees, secured $2.75 million in funding in December of 2007.
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I have to say I think the mechanics of removing the people who are top bloggers as top agents and letting people buy that position negates the months of hard work the bloggers have put in and also lies to the public about who the local experts really are. I am not happy at all with that change. I am the top blogger in my city and county and am not one of the 2 top agents on the new site. The guy who is has about 1/5 my points and hasn't blogged for months.
Very much anticipated and awaited! I am very grateful to AR for the opportunity to utilize Localism, I'm sure I'll happily adjust to the new format at some time in the future.