Faneuil Media

How do you answer that question? It’s an academic discipline, not the subject of a blog post.

My answer, when somebody posed the question last week, was that the significance of place is highly variable — that it means different things to different people and different communities. But that’s not an answer, it’s a tautology.

This is a big issue for those of us building place-based web applications. We know there are unclaimed local advertising dollars out there. We know local search and content products are weak. But do users care? What is the significance of place to the prosumer?

My slightly more considered answer is this: On the web, scale is the distinguishing feature of place.

We use the web because we want to communicate or we want to consume information. This is true locally and globally. The only significance of place is that as you restrict it, you get fewer people to communicate with and less information to consume.

So far, scale has restrained the growth of local web applications. Google doesn’t do a good job answering specific queries about your town because there isn’t as much data available about your town as there is about the iPhone. Backfence didn’t work partly because its geographic structure required too many contributions from too few people.

I think solutions to local scale problems are evolving. This is partly because the levels of use and information on the local web are increasing. It’s also because we’re learning how to build web applications that function well in situations where users and data are limited.

In the long run, once this scale problem is solved, there shouldn’t be much that’s unique about place on the web. It’s a criteria that’s relevant and important to many, many people, but at the end of the day, it’s just another way to organize information and communication.