By Mike Mathieu on January 28th, 2010
This report(PDF) from the Wilburforce Foundation and the Brainerd Foundation, does a good job highlighting standard best practices for online engagement, and does it through the compelling lens of seeing the positive impact in a political campaign. Here are some key ideas that we’ll be taking to heart here at Front Seat:
- Hire great people with professional experience. (We just started recruiting for a new Marketing Manager.)
- Always be testing. (We’ve integrated Google Analytics, but we’re not yet in an analytic-driven, continuous testing mind set.)
- Get signups first. You can get revenue later. (Sign up here!)
- Make sure that all of your emails have a consistent narrative arc.
- Email frequency can go up around specific, time-critical events, without losing your readers
I got more inspiration from the report than just these bullets, but you’ll have to wait to see how our sites change to find out!
By Mike Mathieu on January 27th, 2010
It’s always nice to head into a new year with a clear plan. That start of year clarity — before reality impinges and forces change — is so refreshing. At Front Seat, one of our top goals in 2010 is to build our marketing and community outreach capabilities into a full-time effort. And so I’m happy to announce our first ever search for a world-class Marketing Manager. The full job description is here, but the essence of the job is a wide open mandate to use skills in online, offline, and social media to expand the distribution of our web sites and to promote our mission.
We hope that you’ll apply or mention it to your superstar marketing friends.
By Mike Mathieu on January 14th, 2010
Walk Score is live with the subway transit feed MTA released yesterday! Check out nearby subway stops for any New York City address. (Bus stops coming soon.)
We think this is the first app actually using the new data (get it here or here), so please shout out if you see any problems.
By Mike Mathieu on January 13th, 2010
For the first time, a majority of all transit passenger-miles in the U.S. are now covered by transit agencies with open data. This follows the release of open GTFS feeds from New York’s MTA and represents the first “local jurisdiction” vertical within the burgeoning open data / civic software / Gov 2.0 movement that has made Open the “new normal” way of doing business.
With New York off the list, the new #1 transit agency with no open data is New Jersey Transit, followed by NE Illinois Regional Commuter Railroad, and Metro Atlanta RTA.
City-Go-Round lists 102 transit agencies with open data — a 50% increase since November, when Walk Score first added its public transit support with an open-only policy.
What do citizens get from this new data? Well, app searching on City-Go-Round is now fully functional for New York, and reveals 28 apps available to local riders. Check ‘em out!
A big congratulations to MTA and the NY Open Transit Data group, who have worked hard to overcome the political, legal, and technical hurdles to opening up this civic resource for New Yorkers.
By Mike Mathieu on December 10th, 2009
I’m happy to announce the launch of City-Go-Round, a new searchable directory of public transit apps and web sites. Type in your location and get back a list of all the transportation-related services that work for your city. Biking, walking, and driving apps are also included. Many more apps work if your city’s transit agency provides open data for their transit feeds.
We got plenty of help from Joe Hughes, who leads GTFS transit dev work at Google Maps, and Jehiah Czebotar at GTFS-Data-Exchange, a service to help developers and transit agencies efficiently share and retrieve GTFS data.
The goal is to encourage agencies to open up their data to civic software developers. And we think that making it easy for transit agencies to provide their riders with the benefits and innovations of open data apps will help overcome any barriers to unlocking their data.
What do you think? Are we crazy?
By Front Seat on November 5th, 2009
ZipRealty.com and hundreds of other real estate sites add public transit data provided by Walk Score. Read the press release or blog post.
