August 7, 2010 by Chris Stock
I attended TEDx in Boulder Colorado tonight. Andrew Hyde and company put together an amazing list of 22 speakers that covered a wide range of talks from “What makes things funny?” to “The Value of Energy Efficiency”.
My favorite talk (and I think the crowd favorite) was Brad Feld’s talk on his “Quarterly Week Off the Grid” – a simple idea that he credits to saving his marriage where he and his wife completely disconnect from the world (no phone/no email/etc) and go on vacation. I brought my wife to the event and needless to say she was a huge fan of the concept. I also got a chance to introduce myself to Brad who is a super nice guy.
If you don’t know TED you should start watching the talks now. I watch two talks from TED every day over lunch. I find them incredibly valuable to opening my mind to new ideas and gaining exposure to areas that I otherwise would never have access to.
UPDATE: Photos of the event are now online.
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July 22, 2010 by Chris Stock
From the beginning our vision has been to connect neighbors online to create stronger communities, so when I found the following comment it made my day:
“I’m so impressed with the effectiveness of the eNeighbors system, and the care and concern of our neighbors. Using technology to strengthen a community and to help neighbors is a good thing!” – Janet G.
(A screenshot of the full comment is below.)

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July 5, 2010 by Chris Stock
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July 4, 2010 by Chris Stock
I received a request to publish a current list of neighborhoods in Kansas City that subscribe to eNeighbors.
The list below is for neighborhoods in the Kansas City metro area only (Kansas and Missouri). To see if your neighborhood is online, go to www.eNeighbors.com and search for your neighborhood by zip code.
| Amber Hills Estates |
| Arlington Park |
| Autumn Ridge |
| Berkshire |
| Birchwood |
| Bradford Gardens |
| Briarcliff Community Alliance |
| Briarcliff West |
| Brighton’s Landing |
| Cedar Creek |
| Cedar Ridge Park |
| Coffee Creek Crossing |
| Communities of North Brook |
| Coves |
| Coves North |
| Crimson Ridge |
| Deer Creek |
| Deerwalk |
| Eastbrooke |
| Falcon Valley |
| Fieldstone |
| Forest View |
| Grey Oaks |
| Hampton Place |
| Hawksbury |
| Highlands Ranch |
| Hills of Walden |
| Homestead Woods |
| LeaBrooke |
| Links at LionsGate |
| LionsGate |
| Maple Brook Park |
| Mills Farm |
| Newberry Commons |
| Northwood Trails |
| Nottingham by the Green |
| Nottingham Forest South |
| Oak Park Homes Association |
| Oaks Ridge Meadows |
| Oxford Pointe |
| Park Crossing |
| Parkhill Manor |
| Parkhurst |
| Ravenwood Place |
| Regency By The Lake |
| Riss Lake |
| River Ridge Farms |
| Santa Fe Hills |
| South Hampton |
| Staley Farms |
| Steeplechase |
| The Pavilions of Leawood |
| Tiffany Greens |
| Tuscany Reserve |
| Villas at Parkside |
| Villas of St. Andrews |
| Wakefield Estates |
| Wedgewood |
| Western Auto Lofts |
| Westwoods |
| WhiteHorse |
| Wilshire Farms |
| Windham Park |
| Windsor Hills |
| Woodland Creek |
| Woodland Reserve |
Posted in eneighbors, neighborhood website, social network | 2 Comments »
June 9, 2010 by Chris Stock
You can follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/eNeighbors. I will primarily be posting site maintenance notifications and other related stuff. So be sure to follow us if you want to know what’s going on with the site in real-time.
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June 1, 2010 by Chris Stock
Some neighborhoods just have unfair advantages – “Mt. Bonnell Shores / Colorado Crossing” in Austin, TX is one such neighborhood. Resident Carrell Grigsby was Austin’s PPA Photographer of the year in both 2004 and 2006 and snapped the shot below for their neighborhood website.

Below is a screenshot of the Mt. Bonnell Shores / Colorado Crossing sign in page where the above photo is featured:

View other cool neighborhood photos.
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April 27, 2010 by Chris Stock
I’m excited to announce that eNeighbors has reached a new milestone today – 16,000 homes are now registered to use our service across 85 neighborhoods. This means that there is at least one registered user (homeowner) in 16,000 homes in the neighborhoods that we serve. To put this in perspective, we’re getting close to filling Kemper Arena (Kansas City reference). Next, we’re gunning for Arrowhead Stadium.
From those 16,000 homes there are 17,728 registered users (some homes have multiple users).
In total, there are 31,191 homes that are currently eligible to use our service, which means that in aggregate, 51% of eligible homes are now registered.
Here are some of our best neighborhoods, in no particular order:
- Nottingham Forest South – 583 homes, 526 are registered, 649 residents registered
- Hampton Place – 462 homes, 345 are registered, 383 residents registered
- Communities of North Brook - 894 homes, 625 are registered, 681 residents registered
- Nottingham by the Green – 733 homes, 495 are registered, 567 residents registered
- Riss Lake – 728 homes, 561 are registered, 640 registered residents
I want to say thank you to my team for getting us to this point: Natasha Stock, Dan Stock, Shelly Stock, Phil Freund, and Kim Goings.
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April 16, 2010 by Chris Stock
Google announced that it will be adding “site speed”, how quickly a website responds to web requests, as one of the data points it uses to rank its search results – meaning that if your site is slow, you’ll be pushed down the ranking making it harder for people to find your website. This also means that you’ll be rewarded in Google’s search ranking if you have a fast website.
They also created a new tool for webmasters to use to determine how fast their site is, according to Google anyway. I used their tool to find out how fast our site was and posted the results below.
Performance overview
On average, pages [on eNeighbors.com] take 0.6 seconds to load (updated on Apr 14, 2010). This is faster than 97% of sites. These estimates are of high accuracy (more than 1000 data points). The chart below shows how your site’s average page load time has changed over the last few months. For your reference, it also shows the 20th percentile value across all sites, separating slow and fast load times.

If you want to try it on your site, go to http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools and click Labs –> Site Performance.
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April 12, 2010 by Chris Stock
I recently discovered a free and valuable service called BatchGeoCode – an awesome website that will take your address data and plot it on a map.
We’ve used it a couple of times now to show customers what homes are registered in their neighborhood. For example, see a map of all 529 registered homes in Nottingham Forest South.
If you’re a board member or property manager and your neighborhood is using eNeighbors, you can create a map of registered homes (or non-registered homes) too. Here are the steps:
- Sign in to your eNeighbors Account at http://www.eneighbors.com/
- Click “Go To Admin Tool” (only available for board members and property managers)
- Click “Reports”
- To create a map of Registered Homes click “Registered Homes” to download a spreadsheet of all registered homes
- To create a map of Non-Registered Homes click “Non-Registered Homes” to download a spreadsheet of all non-registered homes
- Go to http://www.batchgeocode.com/ and follow the instructions to create your map
Please email us at support@eneighbors.com if you need help with eNeighbors.com. For help with BatchGeoCode, visit their video tutorials page.
Posted in How to, eneighbors | 3 Comments »
February 23, 2010 by Chris Stock
The FCC recently conducted a survey called “Broadband Adoption and Use in America” that found getting local or community news was the second most common type of activity online, just behind buying a product. Using a social networking site was fourth. (See chart below.)

Of course, I’m happy to see that “local or community” news is listed second but it’s hard to believe that using a social networking site is fourth given that Facebook now has over 350 million users and is listed as the second or third most visited site on the Internet. This seems to highlight the problem with human reported surveys versus computer counted statistics.
As a measure of online activity for local and community news though, this survey may be the best data we have given the fragmentation of local publishers, which makes it difficult to measure this type of activity on a national level.
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