Is topix REALLY becoming the local, online watering hole?

TechCrunch had an interesting article yesterday on Topix. The central message was that it had quietly become the “local watering hole” for small towns, as evidenced by the total comments on the site (now in the 100 M range).  It then went on to make the claim that the reason people like myself haven’t been paying attention is, of course, that you wouldn’t unless you were in one of these small towns – like Pepper Pike – that may not have a daily local newspaper or website that makes it easy to discuss local news.

The explanation seemed to make sense, but to be honest I was just a little skeptical. So I decided to try to take a look at it through the lens of my own small hometown. But it’s not on there. So instead, since the author started the article by saying how useful Topix was for news about his own hometown (Pepper Pike), I decided to take a look at the site pretending I was from there. Having done so, I’m now very, very skeptical about many of the claims in the TechCrunch story.

The first clue something was amiss, in terms of Topix being an “online watering hole”, comes from the “Pepper Pike” homepage. As I scanned through the stories listed, every single one from the last month had the word “comment” at the bottom, with a question mark following it. The reason – nobody had commented on any of them. Hmmm. Then I looked at the list of “recent Pepper Pike discussions“. There was a little more activity on this list, but it was few and far between. Notably, from March 2009 to December 2009, there were only 4 posts. Two had one comment; one had two comments; and one had 25. That doesn’t scream watering hole to me.

I did, however, notice a bit of an explosion in activity starting in February 2010. 10 posts with comments, if you exclude the TechCrunch story itself (which is on the list). Of these, two stood out – “hundreds of teens riot outside movie theater” from March 1st had 460 comments; “JCU students demand sexual orientation protection” had 178. Three more had 20+ comments, and the rest only a couple.

So I decided to check out that first one – perhaps it represented all those Pepper Pike folks who’d just been waiting for a topic to talk about. I started scanning through the comments, and noticed the vast majority of commenters were from Cleveland – hardly a small town. Trying to figure out why this was, I looked up and saw a link to the “full story” – at WJW Fox 8 Cleveland (Cleveland’s Own!). I clicked on it. I noticed the story was about Cleveland Heights, and the word “Pepper” – let alone “Pepper Pike” – wasn’t anywhere to be found. And I noticed that I could freely post a comment, under any name I wanted, right from that site, which would roll up into Topix. Conclusion – there certainly wasn’t anything local or small town driving the commenting on that story.

So I went back to the other story – the one with 178 comments. Sure enough, it was also from WJW Fox 8 Cleveland. Sure enough, it didn’t seem to be about Pepper Pike at all – it was a story from John Carroll University in Cleveland. Now this at least led me to take a quick run at Google maps, and find out that Pepper Pike isn’t all that far outside of Cleveland (about a 12 minute drive from JCU, which as far as I can tell is in Cleveland Heights), so I can understand how these stories are relevant to that place – but the comments hardly appear to be “local watering hole” like. When I scan through, I see people from Wooster, Chicago, Lakewood, Cleveland, the United States… even “the gay next door!”, the self-identified hometown of a man from Sacremento California.

So I went back to the third story – the one with 40 comments – same source (WJW Fox 8 Cleveland), same type of variation in commenters. That seemed like a solid of enough trend line to stop the process. At least in the case of Pepper Pike, it seems that nobody is chatting about truly local issues (property taxes, etc.). Almost all of the comments that are generated are around a few, somewhat inflammatory stories (think murders, riots) from a nearby Cleveland area (as posted on “Cleveland’s own Fox 8″), and the comments – while often skewing to the city, or at least state – tend to flow from all over the place. That’s a different story, to me, then what TechCrunch was indicating.

This would also seem to help explain the “surprise” mentioned at the end of the TechCrunch article – that 75% of active commenters use iPhones, which appears odd given Topix’s focus on small towns and communities. The conclusion the article reached is that this just shows the appeal of the iPhone to the masses. My conclusion is obviously different, given I’m not at all convinced the that Topix’s comments are flowing in from small towns and communities.

And while I won’t get into it here, I find the stories that people comment on (and the type of comments given) aren’t exactly inspiring, to say the least. This isn’t topix specific by any means – I think the same on many, many sites- but wow.

I don’t have time to go check a bunch of other small towns, but my hunch is the same dynamic likely plays out over and over. If anyone would care to validate that claim – or refute it – feel free.

Tagged as: cleveland, comments, community, TechCrunch, topix