The Community Engine Blog: communityCreation Archives

A podcast community

We've started a podcasting site, Muscle Ventures. The local community seems to be working. Let's see what we can do for the distributed Internet community.

For some time, I've been wanting to create a video podcast site and see if I could get a community going around it. Based on things I've learned from blogging bootcamps and dealing with consulting clients, I'm convinced most successful communities have to have some real world basis. It's not that purely online communities cannot thrive, it's just that they tend to be composed of true topic devotees who are also facile with computers and use them as a principal means of accessing information. That tends to limit the possibilities of what can work.

By the way, by community, I don't just mean site visitors but rather people who are aware of each other and care what each other is doing. So, I'm not just talking about pulling in readers with adwords and getting them to convert.

So, what we have done is put together a site called Muscle Ventures. It offers text content, exercise analysis videos, and podcasts. The site seems to be working for the local community. We'll see what we can do for the Internet community. I'll be writing more on this topic as the situation evolves.

Bud posted this on May 17, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Why can't you just produce and consume interaction streams?

I want to see the interaction going on at your site. That way, I'll know whether to give you my attention.

So, I read with interest Matt McCallister's plaint last week about how long it is taking RSS to reach the mainstream. The weird thing is that by many measures, RSS is mainstream but just not widely recognized as such. After all, 31% of the online population use it, it's just that 90% of this group don't know they are doing it.

Given the gnarly technical nature of RSS, Matt wonders, rightly I think, what the sales pitch is to the average user. Why is it useful? Well, it's clear that the idea of being able to subscribe to the sites you want in your portal page is taking off. That's where the 31% comes from. But, it could be better. Instead of treating blogs and other small publishers as junior content producers for aggregation by the monetizing big boys, why not make it just as easy to subscribe to a small site's stream of interaction. I get the site-owner's data as well as the site's stream of comments and trackbacks. That's really where it's at for many small sites I deal with.

Sixapart and Blogger, two of the biggest blog providers could easily provide these streams. Their SPAM controls are adequate that the signal-to-noise ratio on interaction streams should be quite good. That way, as a consumer, I'm free to join community as I see fit without having to visit the site every day. Portal publishers should love it because it is yet more free content. Maybe their allied community sites won't though because it breaks their ownership of the community space.

Bud posted this on February 13, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

(almost) All blogging is local

The long tail is crap for most bloggers. They're happy enough just to communicate with micro-audiences.

Over the past month, I've come to the conclusion that all of this discussion of the long tail is crap. The idea of the long tail is that there are a few winner main stream sites that receive the lion's share of attention. However, there is hope for lesser niche sites because the Internet audience is large enough that they will still be economically viable. So, for instance, digg may be the winner for now in technology sites, but there is still room for specialized sites like the Corante web hub.

Well, maybe, but for the most part, I think it is the wrong point of departure. Most (real, not SPAM) people who write blogs are not writing them to capture some piece of a larger pie. Rather, their point of departure is to communicate with some local audience. Oh, it would be nice to gain greater general visibility, but that is not the motivator. In fact, it may be distracting from the real value creation process. Here are two illustrative cases:

Continue reading "(almost) All blogging is local"

Bud posted this on January 5, 2006 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

Helped develop and now have joined the Corante Network

The Community Engine played an important role in developing the new Corante hub network. In future posts, I'll be writing about the technology challenges we faced in bringing the network together. I also have some ideas for how to create bottom-up communities across network member blogs that I will share in future posts.

As Stowe Boyd mentioned yesterday, Corante has established a network of topical sites that re-aggregate content from “thought-leading” bloggers and provide editorial insight on emerging trends. I'm honored to note that this blog was chosen to be part of Corante's web hub. I'm also proud to announce that The Community Engine played a pivotal role in getting the technological infrastructure to work.

Continue reading "Helped develop and now have joined the Corante Network"

Bud posted this on November 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)

Corante Symposium on Social Architecture Wrap-up

I'd like to see conferences like this make more use of the available social tools to create pre and post conference opportunities for interaction and learning.

It's probably best to just quickly state likes and dislikes about the Corante Symposium on Social Architecture:

Likes:
- The cocktail party the night before at the Harvard Faculty Club was great.
- Lunch was extremely good, a whole table of people who just wanted to talk on topics of interest.
- The general quality of attendees, in particular the people who were not speakers.
Dislikes:
- After lunch, I thought the explicit exclusion from participation of people sitting in the back section of the auditorium was ridiculous. The fact that the exclusion was repeated by two marquee speakers was just over the top.
- The level of audience participation was good, but might have been even better.

I really learned some things at lunch and the cocktail party. I really liked the people I talked to and their openness to conversation. Now, let me spend a moment detailing how I might fix some of the things I did not like.

Continue reading "Corante Symposium on Social Architecture Wrap-up"

Bud posted this on November 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBack (1)

Great Lunch with Kaliya Hamlin and Kevin Marks

I think getting to know Kaliya Hamlin means getting her to exhaust her array of possible business cards on you.

I started out with Kevin Marks and shared with him my misgivings about his session, namely that there was no there there. I did point out to him that he had succeeded in getting me to contribute to the IRC room by putting it on screen, something I never do.

Continue reading "Great Lunch with Kaliya Hamlin and Kevin Marks"

Bud posted this on November 15, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Ning

Ning might fill a sweet spot where non-programmer entrepreneurs can create applications for groups of people who want to interact with each other. That's the missing link in today's social software value proposition.

I've been trying out Ning, which has been written about by many people. Ning is essentially a platform for creating interactive web apps. Here's one of them:

Dave Winer thinks it's a product that does not do anything original. I have a slightly different view. It's a product that has some potential if it can make developing and maintaining interactive web apps so easy that non-programmer community entrepreneurs can do it.

Continue reading "Ning"

Bud posted this on October 4, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)

What Really Makes a Learning Community Happen?

Community sites are aggregations of people who are interested in what each other has to say.

In his post, Remixable Web: Public RSS Aggregator, John Tropea makes this point about our current learning remix project at Michigan's Ross School of Business:

This newsmastering portal is aggregating blog posts as well as del.icio.us bookmarks, with categories/tags intact…it’s the best I’ve seen yet!
John Tropea

which is an incredible compliment, and I thank him for it. But I see the real challenge here as creating a community site, and a simple aggregation site is just not enough to achieve that.

Continue reading "What Really Makes a Learning Community Happen?"

Bud posted this on September 19, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

MBA Bootcamp Changes Local Web Search Landscape

Over seventy percent of households in the U.S. use Internet search to find local products and services. We ran a bootcamp where Michigan MBAs used Web 2.0 technologies to compete with a prominent local business for searches on its targeted keywords. Bootcamp sites beat the local company in just under half of the searches and placed on the first page of search results over half the time.

From May 10 through June 23, 2005, we ran the first High Octane Blogging Bootcamp for 33 MBAs at University of Michigan's Ross School of Business. Our client for the bootcamp, Coach's, served the Ann Arbor and Ypsilanti, Michigan market for disaster cleaning and restoration services. Recent surveys indicate that over seventy percent of households search the web when shopping locally for services such as Coach's. We wanted the bootcamp to demonstrate how Web 2.0 technologies like weblogs and RSS could help better establish a company's search presence to take advantage of this channel. To really push the idea, we informally set a goal that bootcamp participants' team weblogs outperform Coach's site on searches for its own keywords.

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Bud posted this on August 11, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBack (1)

Microformats and the remixable web

To answer Jon Udell and others, microformats enable the remixable web.

Yesterday, I spent the day at technorati and the evening with Tantek Çelik, Ryan King, Jeff Barr, Chris Messina, and a host of others at the second ever (?) microformats group dinner. A lot happened, and I'm not here to give a blow-by-blow account. Rather, I want to convey the one major insight I walked away with (there were many minor ones). To answer Jon Udell, Microformats enable the remixable web.

Continue reading "Microformats and the remixable web"

Bud posted this on June 30, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

Copyright and the remixable web

Will remixing the web encourage people to use more liberal copyrights because the value of participating is higher than the value of retaining an exclusive lock on their data?

I'm listening to the John Battelle panel on local search at O'Reilly's Where 2.0. John Frank of Metacarta just raised the point that dhtml (aka ajax, an easy javascript technology for mixing in content into web pages from web services) enables copyright infringement, a bad thing from the perspective of the recent Supreme Court ruling on file sharing services. You're probably okay if you do not encourage stealing of copyrighted materials. I wonder if things like microformats and easy data sharing will push more and more providers into putting more liberal copyright restrictions on their work that allow for sharing.

Bud posted this on June 29, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (1)

Archives are at the heart of decentralized communities

In decentralized, emergent communities, the community archive defines the community over time. Therefore, designers of such communities need to pay attention to the processes by which these archives emerge. The ongoing debate over folksonomy provides us with a public record of decentralized archiving strategies that do and don't work.

In describing one of the fundamental building blocks of decentralized blog communities, James Farmer remarks:

If you’re implementing blogs in your school, college or university or even organisation one of the first things you’re going to want to think about is aggregation.
BLOGSAVVY » Savvy public aggreation tools, the key to binding your blogs together

Nothing could be more true. The “River of News” style public aggregators that James then goes on to review all do a good job of displaying a decentralized community's zeitgeist. But, by itself, zeitgeist as captured by near real-time blog aggregation is insufficient to sustain decentralized communities for the long term. For that, these communities need archives.

Archives crystallize what such communities found important over time and ultimately define the community.

Continue reading "Archives are at the heart of decentralized communities"

Bud posted this on June 2, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

High Octane Blogging — How to form business community

Online communities usually form around information honey pots. They thrive when individual contributors get reinforced, and the reinforced behavior makes the honey pot richer.

In blogsavvy today, James Farmer makes a very good point regarding how to organize online communities:

While the hub model of online communities has each person coming to one place, the hubris approach has each participant secure in their own space and the ‘centre’ simply being an administrative / aggregation portal to these different spaces. Through the portal context each user is able to find relevant users to themselves and aggregate individually each of them. In essence you have a blogosphere… just right on your doorstep.
Blogsavvy » Creating and sustaining a local blogging community - hubs, hubris & your neighboursphere

In the new High Octane Blogging Bootcamp and the original Learning Blogosphere, we used a combination of the two to a little bit better effect than either alone. In my experience with both of these efforts, there are really three dynamic components required to create an effective blogging community:

Continue reading "High Octane Blogging — How to form business community"

Bud posted this on May 24, 2005 | Permalink | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)

The Community Engine

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