Neighborhood net.

• Author: Reed, Carson
• Position: Includes related article on the company's agreement with the American Public Power Assn. - Neighborhood Link

TED PINKOWITZ HAS EVERYBODY SURFING THE 'NET - TO THEIR NEIGHBORS

Forget Bosnia, Somalia and Tibet. If you're looking for hot-button issues near and dear to the heart of the average American, take a stroll through a couple of the thousands of Internet-based community bulletin boards accessible through Neighborhood Link. (See www.neighborhoodlink.com/public/).

At Ridge at Fox Run in Colorado Springs, concerned citizen Steve Waldmann alerts his neighbors to the proposed expansion of a local gravel pit. In Columbus, Ohio's Park Place neighborhood, residents Matt and Mary Sweitzer post a reward for (and later announce the happy return of) their missing cat, Albert. In Indianapolis, an anonymous resident of Southern Springs complains about the unkempt lawns of several vacant houses.

Barking dogs, vacant lots, garage.sales, broken streetlights - these are the heady issues of neighborhood politics, at times more important to a homeowner than all the world's wars and natural disasters.

And now, it's all on the World Wide Web, thanks to Neighborhood Link, the latest and arguably most original entrant in the Internet's fastest growing market, the local content market.

Neighborhood Link, a subsidiary of Denver-based E Central, has profited by providing free web pages for neighborhoods from the teeming brownstones of inner-city 'hoods to the gated green enclaves of the well-to-do.

The company is the brainchild of Denver publisher-turned-Internet-entrepreneur Ted Pinkowitz, who launched it in October 1998. Neighborhood Link already is ensconced in more than 20 major metropolitan markets, pursuing an aggressive strategy that includes major cities as well as smaller towns (see sidebar).

It's a unique, and uniquely civic-minded, Internet niche.

"We're the only company in America focused on civic communications," said Pinkowitz. "This is part of a trend. The federal government is devolving. The tasks it used to perform are falling to the states. State responsibilities are falling to the cities. And cities are looking to neighborhoods to take up more of the slack."

Pinkowitz comes by his interest in neighborhoods honestly. As publisher of the Denver neighborhood tabloid ICON, he was among the earliest boosters of the former warehouse-and-derelict district now known as LoDo. Neighborhood Link's parent company, 5-year-old E Central, is an Internet Service Provider (ISP) and local content portal.

The inspiration for Neighborhood Link came at a meeting of...