Hello, All You Happy People.
Welcome to Dreamville, the Dream Local blog. If you are reading this, I can assume two things: you’re likely to be visiting us for the first time, and you’re wondering what we’re all about. In this blog, we hope to write about a wide variety of subjects, although most of what we write about will be related to a central concept, something we happen to care a lot about: the concept of local networking.
It’s more or less a given at this point, we think, that social networking is where the internet is headed. As the internet goes, so goes an increasingly significant component of human culture and communication, and so the success of social networking isn’t just a statement about internet culture. It’s a statement about our culture in general.
Over the last decade, we’ve seen companies like Google, Craigslist, MySpace, Wikipedia, YouTube, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter making strides toward an open-ended and highly democratic approach to online content. The picture that emerges is one where we are doing more and more of our communication and sharing online; relying more on the internet as a source of information and as a medium for staying connected; and crucially, finding our information and our connections in places that are open-ended and driven by the needs, interests, and talents of the user community — a user community that has grown to include broad swaths of the U.S. populace.
The founders of Dream Local are people with experience in local search, newspapers, and the yellow pages, so we’re especially interested in how businesses and consumers in the local community might benefit from these developments. In times past, the print milieu filled all of those needs. The yellow pages gave businesses a chance to reach customers, and the newspapers provided a broad community forum for a variety of purposes: local and national news, classified advertising, job notices, editorials, and so on. Other media, like community bulletin boards, also provided opportunities for communication.
We love print and want it to find its footing in this changing world, but we also recognize that declining readerships are a fact, and that they have a lot to do with how powerful the social internet has become. Why check the yellow pages when I can Google it? Why look at want ads and classifieds when I can use Craigslist? Not only that, but online services have created new opportunities for social interaction that we didn’t even know we needed but now we can’t live without. Yesterday’s bridge club is today’s FarmVille.
Maybe all of this is just a fad, but it doesn’t look that way. In fact, it looks like more and more of the interactions in the local community will eventually take place online. Dream Local wants to be out in front of these developments, serving the needs of local residents and business owners alike. We want to help create the lines of communication that will best serve local communities in the future. As we say on our About Us page:
We want to empower citizens in their role as consumers and as members of communities. We want to enable business owners to better communicate with customers and listen to their needs, interests, and concerns. We want to establish lines of connection between ordinary people and community organizations, interest groups, event promoters, and news outlets.
Simply put, Dream Local wants to bring the concept of local networking to life.
Stan Gauss, CEO, Dream Local, Inc.
For press inquiries, contact:
Carl Schindler
carl.schindler@dreamlocal.com
716.812.5651
