In December of 2006 a major storm hit the Seattle area. Power was out for days, thousands of homes were damaged, and a resident of our neighborhood drowned in her basement during a flash flood. And throughout the ordeal there was a shocking lack of information. When would power be restored? Which roads were blocked due to fallen trees? There was no local, authoritative source where people could go to get neighborhood-level information.

That led to an idea. What if there was a service that would let anyone launch a neighborhood news website, where other members could join and help report the news that was happening on their street. They would be grass-roots hyperlocal news communities, providing a new layer of news coverage that hadn't previously existed. And the naturally-targeted nature of the audience would provide a great place for local businesses to advertise, allowing them to reach all of the people around them who would be most likely to do business with them.

We started Instivate in February of 2007, wrote thousands of lines of code for eight months, and in October of 2007 we launched our first beta site for our own neighborhood: CentralDistrictNews.com. The following year, Justin Carder, publisher of an existing neighborhood blog in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle, moved his blog to the platform and soon joined the team as our VP of Business Development. 

Over the next two years hundreds of sites were launched on the platform. Some only lasted a few days. Some went on for years and continue today. All of them gave us great feedback about what worked and what didn't, which we tried to plow back into our product development efforts.

And as our network of sites here in Seattle grew, we realized that we were missing a crucial component. We were selling ads on individual sites, and had sold some larger campaigns across multiple sites. But access to more regional advertisers would require a network that went beyond just neighborhood blogs. So we took our ad technology and broke it out  as a separate product that could be installed on any content platform. Justin worked hard and recruited a network of 25+ high quality sites in the Seattle area to be a part of the SeattleIndieAds network. 

With a sales team out hitting the streets every day, soon we were mailing monthly checks of hundreds to thousands of dollars each to our network of members sites.

New direction
Recently we've been taking a hard look at our business, evaluating what is working and what is more of a challenge. And given our limited resources, we've decided to focus all of our efforts on our advertising services. And given that, we've made a decision to deprecate our Neighborlogs content platform. It's the least profitable part of the business and requires the highest support effort to keep it going. And the bottom line is that there's plenty of other good, free content-management solutions out there that are good-enough to work in the neighborhood news world.

We'll be providing new export tools to allow existing site owners to extract their posts and photos, in a format that is easily portable to other systems such as Wordpress. And while the Neighborlogs service will continue running for now with a lower level of support, we've set a date this spring for sites to transition off the platform.

We know that many of our site owners came from other solutions, love Neighborlogs, and would rather not go back. And we do have long-term goals to open-source the Neighborlogs system so that they could install it on their own servers and keep running their sites as-is. However, there's a significant amount of development work to make that possible and we can't commit to any date when it might be accomplished. But we are investigating different grant options for funding that might allow a quicker and smoother transition into the open source world.

Instivate will focus exclusively on our local ad network in Seattle http://seattleindieads.com, our advertising tools and our data services. We'll be continuing with our local and regional ad sales efforts, and helping all of the existing members of that network to better monetize their great local content.

In a small company, a change in focus often means a change in personnel, and this case is no different. Effective immediately, Justin Carder will be taking over day to day operation of the company, promoted up to the role as President. I'll be stepping down from that position and will be pursuing other opportunities. But I'm not disappearing and will stay involved in a consulting role to provide technical and business support throughout the transition.

Founding a start-up and has been a great experience and one that I will never regret. I've worked with some fantastic people over the last four years and we've all learned a ton. But change is a necessary part of life and the life of small companies, and I'm confident that Justin has the skills and knowledge to successfully guide Instivate into its next stage of life.

Thanks to everyone involved for helping to make history in community news!

-- Scott Durham