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Scaling information consumption — the first step in creating community

Participating in electronic communities is all about consuming information. Increasing the scale of an individual's ability to consume information is one of the first steps in scaling their ability to participate in electronic communities. If you are trying to start an electronic community, scaling your own information consumption is the place to start.

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In counseling Career Consulting Physicians, I'm going to depart a bit from the gentle approach to community creation which goes something like this:

  • read a few blogs;
  • make connections with a few people;
  • start writing posts;
  • get people to read them and comment.

These are not bad points and in fact are a great way to start posting, but I think there is a Step 0, “Become a power consumer of syndicated content”. Well, why?

In a post yesterday, I made the claim that the first criteria for interactivity was scalability. I focused mainly on the notion of scaling community administration by reducing in all possible ways human time spent supporting individuals. The thing I did not touch on was the need to scale the individual's ability to consume information. In the electronic world, people perceive community by consuming information. If you can scale their capacity to consume information, you effectively increase their ability to participate in the community.

Therefore, if you are trying to create an electronic community, you should start by scaling your own information consumption. In some sense, you are the first community participant. The easiest way to scale your information consumption is by getting an RSS feedreader and subscribing to some feeds. By the weekend, I will write a how-to focused on using the sage feedreader in firefox, a new browser that is rapidly gaining share on Microsoft's Internet Explorer. My rationale for this is that it is the lowest cost way, based on experience with large groups of novices, to get started feedreading. That will be Step 0 for the community creator. Scaling consumption for people you are trying to get to participate in your community is a slightly different matter, and I will have more to say on that in later posts.

Bud posted this on January 27, 2005

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» Bloglining all over the place from Moore Stuff
Bud Gibson pointed out that he was going to discuss using the sage feedreeder in firefox. Edward Vielmetti commented how Bloglines is a great way to share RSS feeds publicly.... [Read More]

Tracked on January 30, 2005 05:17 PM

Comments

Another good newsfeed reader is Bloglines, which has the advantage of not needing a software install. It won't work for private content, but for public content it's really good.

Posted by: Edward Vielmetti [TypeKey Profile Page] at January 28, 2005 11:23 PM

Interesting note, I retried this today. The subscribe to this button makes a lot of sense. Things I reviewed 6 months ago have really progressed.

Posted by: Bud Gibson at January 30, 2005 10:42 AM

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