Over at boing boing, Cory Doctorow exerts some consumer clout I wish I had. This post tells a simple story of being treated rudely in an overpriced café in Brighton, UK. He may reach enough readers who have occasion to go looking for a place to sit and sip in Brighton that his recommendation of a friendlier more considerate place just steps down the street could have a discernable effect on the P&L statements of these two establishment.
In an era when the expectations customers could once have of considerate service from businesses are rapidly vanishing, I often find myself wishing I had an effective way of letting others who might vote with their wallets know when I have been outraged or, to the contrary, delighted by the service I’ve received from a store or an eatery.
As the weblogging phenomenon has grown, it has usually seemed appealing to me to have a disembodied presence building a community unfettered by geographic limitations. But, while someone like Cory is a globetrotter with worldwide readership, I am at the moment more thinking about the web being a vehicle for the extension of local community. It would seem to be a natural medium for collaborative, community-based exchange of civic views, organizing around community issues and local politics, and, yes, simple consumer recommendations.
I am not talking about the online presence of the local community newspaper, like the Brookline TAB we have here where I live. Just as weblogging has created a populist, grassroots-based track parallel to the mainstream media in the discussion of matters of national and international importance, it would appear to be an effective parallel medium on a community scale. The way I read weblogs, at least, they are an efficient medium for sifting through an enormous amount of opinion and information to drill down and explore the details of areas that grab my attention or interest me. Why hasn’t this developed as a component of the penetration of the WWW into everyone’s lives over the past decade? Or am I missing something? Do other communities have “community bulletin board” types of public weblogs that mine doesn’t appear to?
[Are there any Brookline readers of FmH? Would you be interested in exploring this further? If so, drop me a line.]
