Entries Tagged 'Community' ↓

new site from Cam Barrett and Joe Stump: TodaysPapers.com. Adding community features to news stories from all over the web. I wonder if Aaron’s NYTimes stuff could add something to this? Trouble is Aaron has been so very coy about his /knows/ stuff that I’m not sure I follow what it is.

Jim Cashel’s Online Community Report for years now - since issue 1 - by email, but I hadn’t been by the site in a while. What was once just an afterthought (or so it seemed) has become quite an impressive site that has expanded as the concept of Virtual Community has expanded as well. It now covers social networks and many of the other new kinds of virtual community. Worth a look.

the idea of “social software” became the hottest thing. Jack Schofield in the Guardian takes a look in an article called Social climbers. The best quote to my eye is the quote Schofield includes from Tom Coates of plasticbag.org:

But Tom Coates, from UpMyStreet. com, has reservations about the “current hysteria”. Three months before the conference, he posted a short essay on his blog, Plasticbag.org, saying: “There’s something about the abandonment of concepts of ‘online community’ and the complete rejection of familiar terms and paradigms like the message board that worries me. There seems to be a bizarre lack of history to the whole enterprise - a desire to claim a territory as unexplored when it’s patently not.”

Shell gets a clue. Doc links to an article by David Weinberger about Royal Dutch/Shell’s online forum. Unlike most representatives of the genre, it isn’t a tightly controlled and highly sanitized bit of fluff but a really open forum for comment and criticism. Importantly, it’s not just a handful of Shell employees who are authorized to respond either - anyone can add their commentary in response to posts. Even when they accuse Shell of murdering people.

I just found out that Café Utne, a site I’ve worked on for almost 5 years, has been nominated for a Webby award in the Community category. It’s a little strange in that the category is a bit of a dog’s breakfast of totally different types of sites. But pretty cool. I’ve literally spent thousands of hours there, and it’s my primary online home. I mean, other than this!