Alfred Thompson the Cyberspace People Watcher: Community

The World is My Neighborhood

Thu, 31 Jan 2008 19:54:06 GMT

I must confess that this whole "world is flat" can get a bit much at times. I tried to read the book by that name but got bored with it and never finished. That seldom happens to me but in this case it seemed like it could all have been said in a single chapter. But there is clearly a lot of reality in that basic idea.

As I have written before I have a crazy fascination with the statistics of people who read my blogs. How many there are is of course somewhat interesting but for me the most interesting part is where the readers are coming from. I have gotten used to seeing links from China, the UK, Singapore, Australia, and the Philippines. There are people I know there and many have left comments on my posts. I haven't met many of them in person unfortunately but I know they are there and I think of them as friends. Somehow one expects their friends to show up. :-) And one hopes they stick around.

I've gotten used to seeing visits from India and I assume that is because interest in technology seems to be very very high there. Most of the India hits as well as the hits from Africa and the Middle East seem to come via search engines. But who is that person in Qatar who comes in directly? Search engine based visits can and do seem to come in from everywhere. It's a pretty exciting thing to see visits from places one has barely heard of. It's even more exciting when I see that they are returning again and again.

But honestly the most exciting thing, perhaps because it is so rare, is when visits come from places that are geographically close to me. Someone in a town near me in New Hampshire visited? Wow! Small world! And there are places I wish I had closer ties to. I get visitors from Norway - the home of my grandparents - and find that exciting. On the other end I get an occasional visit from Brooklyn NY where I grew up but retain few personal ties. I feel connected to these places when someone from there visits my blog.

When you have a blog anyone in the world can stop by and just might. There is no telling what will make them stop by nor what they will think and say when they do. Conversations happen across international and cultural boundaries. Could this be the way peace eventually breaks out? Could we all start to feel like someone on the other side if the world is as real, as normal, as friendly as the person in the house next to ours. Wouldn't that me wonderful?

How famous do you have to be to be in wikipedia?

Sat, 09 Dec 2006 02:16:43 GMT

Did you ever wonder how famous one has to be to be included in wikipedia? I didn't really think about it much until a blogger I read briefly had a biography posted in wikipedia. She didn't write the biography (wikipedia apparently frowns on such practice anyway) and was supportive of the biography being deleted.

That got me to thinking about the issue. Who determines who is included? Well wikipedia has some guidelines on the subject. Like much about wikipedia they guidelines are not hard and fast rules. It makes me think of the "pirate's code" in the "Pirate's of the Caribbean" movies. But at least they are there. Anyone can put in a biography and anyone can challenge the idea that the biography belongs. Once a challenge happens there is a discussion and a vote. It all seems so civilized and transparent.

Of course one has to ask just how important a wikipedia biography is any more. Or any encyclopedia for that matter. Today anyone can write up a biography of anyone and put it out on the Internet. Search engines will let people find it. Biographies can easily link to other related biographies and the theoretical "six degrees of separation" might even allow people to explore and find new people just by jumping along links. There is little in the way of filtering out of biographies any more.

Back in the day when Yahoo! was the one true Internet directory, before indexes like AltaVista came along, there was a Yahoo! categories for personal home pages. I tried several times to get my own home page listed there. I never had any luck. For some reason no matter how many times I submitted it they never added it to the directory. I don't know what the process was for inclusion as it wasn't documented like wikipedia's guidelines are but it felt pretty arbitrary to me. Exclusionary would perhaps be a good word. Today if you go to Yahoo! search and enter "Alfred Thompson" my home page shows up as the first link. This blog as the third and my work related blog as the second. So I guess things have come my way a bit. That just shows the openness of the process - I think. So famous or not your story can be told and people can find it.

Coming back to wikipedia though. What wikipedia offers though is the appearance (perhaps the reality but I'm not ready to go that far) of independent and impartial confirmation of both the record and the notability of the people with biographies there. There is some good in that I suppose.

The one missing people is coverage for people who are notable only within a small group. Someone could be very well known among knitters for example but not be famous or notable enough for wikipedia. Or perhaps someone who have been very involved, dare I say famous, in their own small little town or geographic community? Don't they deserve a definitive and impartial record some where? Thinking about the "long tail" I think it would be great if various communities established their on wiki's for telling the story of "locally famous" people. Now wouldn't that be special!

Comments - is it about content or audience?

Tue, 17 Oct 2006 15:31:53 GMT

I've been very interested in this whole question of why some blogs and even some blog posts in different blogs get more comments than others. There is a great list of suggestions I found recently at the Instigator Blog which were summarized by Ted Demopoulos on his blog. The short list is:

Controversial / In-Your-Face Headlines.

Keep Posts Short.

Take a Stand

End Blog Posts With Questions.

Put a Kicker Inside.

It's a good list and I think that those are among the best ideas I've read on the subject. Interestingly enough one thing that has generated more comments than anything else for me has been linking to people who are already involved in a controversial discussion. It almost doesn't matter if I am agreeing or disagreeing with them but often that brings both traffic and comments to my post. This is more true if there is a trackback sent to the other blog but I have found that when there is a controversy going on people go out of their way to look for other comments on the issue.

You're most likely to get a comment if you have something new to say on the issue. Just saying "so and so has a great post" and then adding nothing new to the discussion is not going to get comments. Explaining why someone is wrong or adding new information that supports your side of the issue is more likely to get some comments. Being in a very small minority on an issue tends to get more comments as well.

The other big factor that seems to get far too little discussion though is audience. I have four blogs. Two of them get very few comments and two of them get comments on just about every post. The blogs with few comments have many more (orders of magnitude) readers than the two that get lots of comments. Not what you might expect is it? But the two "smaller" blogs are part of blogging communities. There are a group of people at each site who are friends and they who comment on each others posts on a regular basis. Mini conversations develop quickly and easily.

I think that some of the very large and famous blogs also have a community of frequent commenters. That seems to stimulate even more comments as commenters comment on each other's comments. It can be hard to get that rolling but once it does there is no stopping it.

So I think the type of community around a blog can be a huge influencer in how many comments and what sort of comments appear on a blog. I don't know that many people pay attention to that. Most people seem surprised when a community develops around a blog.

So does your blog get a lot of comments? Why do you think that is? Is it the posts or the audience?

Technorati tags: blogs, comments, community

Hey let’s pick on the new guy!

Sun, 16 Jul 2006 14:52:09 GMT

One of the things that always bothered me back in the old days of the Internet, back when most conversations were USENET news groups, was a tendency for people who had been around a while to flame (really berate) new people for even a minor faux pas. Now on one hand common sense tells one that they should read a while before jumping in to a conversation and one does want to learn something about the culture of an environment when they enter it but at the same time people can’t be expected to learn all of a society’s mores and values in a short period of time. Mistakes are going to happen. If you really want people to join your community you really should be gentle when introducing people to the culture and helping them understand where they went wrong. You give them advice and correction in private or if in public you are very diplomatic about it.

I always thought that the people who jumped on people did so because of immaturity, lack of patience or a feeling of great (and often exaggerated) self-importance. Children pick on each other because they haven’t yet learned how to act in a social world. People who lack patience just can’t wait for others to catch up. I suspect that many of them didn’t learn things before they jumped in (remember that they lack patience) and were probably flamed themselves. So when someone newer comes along that is a chance to retaliate against the world. But the overly self-important are the ones who worry me the most. People grow up, they can learn patience but the people who are overly self-important tend to get worse over time. Those are the ones who feel that they have to criticize “for the good of the community.” Their time is much too valuable for them to wait for others to learn slowly or for them to make the effort to sugar coat their advice. Those are the real community killers in my opinion.

One would like to think that we are in a more enlightened more, moderate, more friendly Internet today. But apparently we are not. Recently Dell Computer opened a blog. I’m not going to link to the discussions because who is saying what is not so important as the general nature of the discussion. But suffice it to say that the greeting from a number of influential bloggers was anything but welcoming. Given that many of these bloggers had been after Dell in particular and companies in general to engage in blog conversations you’d like to think that the response would have been something along the lines of “Welcome to the blogosphere. We’ll be following your interactions with customers with interest. Oh and if we can help out let us know.” If you thought that would happen you would be wrong. The greeting was more along the lines of lists of things they were doing wrong and berating them for being clueless. In fact one A-list blogger told them that they might have been better not blogging at all. Well, that will sure encourage other companies to blog won’t it!

People can learn a lot about how the blogosphere works by reading blogs. They can read articles and interviews and have experts come and talk to them about it. I don’t think that you can really understand blogging unless you actually do it. Sure the ideal thing is to learn from other people’s mistakes but to some extent you have to be willing to make and learn from your own mistakes. Things will go a lot better and we’ll have a lot more people blogging if we treat new bloggers with a little kindness and gentility. Not everyone relishes a flame war. If you pick on the new guys you’ll wind up either with no new guys or a very uncivil society. I don’t think any of us really wants either of those outcomes. So let’s get out there and be friendly.

The Reality of Real Life

Fri, 03 Mar 2006 15:29:07 GMT

I'm spending much of this week in Houston Texas at the SIGCSE conference. This is a great conference of computer science educators. Most of the people here are from colleges and universities but there are a good number of high school computer science teachers. High school computer science teachers are the audience for my work related blog.

Now I know, at least at one level, that my blog is being read. I see the statistics on web and RSS reads that the site provides. I have done many of the usual ego searches and so I know that people have added me to lists of "blogs I read." One would think that would be enough but of course it isn't. That is all "on the Internet." It doesn't feel completely real.

But yesterday several people who I had never met in person before told me that they read my blog. That is one of the real highlights of my time here at SIGCSE. One reader made a big thing about meeting me but to be honest it was at least as exciting for me to meet a real live reader. Someone is out there and reads what I write. If that isn't exciting about blogging I don't know what is.

So if you get the chance to meet in person someone whose blog you read please tell them you are a reader. It will make their day and it will make them a happy blogger.

Guest Book

Wed, 21 Dec 2005 15:03:57 GMT

Welcome to my blog!

This is the topic for one off questions and discussions. Call it a meta entry if you will. Drop comments here to say hello, invite me to visit your blog, ask questions about this blog or me that do not relate to a specific post. Just any of the general run of the mill sort of thing that doesn't really fit anywhere else. That way we can keep comments on specific blog entries on topic.

Alfred Thompson

PS: I don't know why I didn't do this first thing when I created the blog. Well, we'll see how it works now. I'll have a link to this entry so that people can always find it easily.

Wikipedia edit wars?

Thu, 01 Dec 2005 20:03:19 GMT

Kevin Marks complains that he has been edited out of the wikipedia article on podcasting. Again. I seem to remember hearing (reading actually) other stories of people writing history to match their own view of events. Or perhaps to self promote? I don't know. But it seems to me that the lack of controls pretty much means this sort of childish behavior is going to continue. And it hurts the credibility of wikipedia in my eyes.

Of course it happens with books. I've read sections of books from different countries that covered the same events in very different ways. But at least there you know who the people in charge of the book are and can judge their biases. Letting just anyone edit wikipedia without attribution or identification is different.

Why I don’t care if Scoble links to me

Sun, 06 Nov 2005 03:00:17 GMT

Robert Scoble had a blog the other day with hints on how to get him to link to your content. Now Robert has linked to this blog in the past and that is certainly not a bad thing. But to be honest his is not the blog I really want to link to mine. Why? Because for the most part his audience is not my target audience (to the extent I actually have a target audience.) Oh sure there may be a good number on an absolute scale but I am talking as a percentage.

This blog is about social computing and while Robert talks about that fairly often that is not why (I assume) the majority of people read him. So if once in a while I say something of interest and Robert links to me I’ll see some traffic. If traffic was my goal (if I was selling advertising space and hits got me money) sure I would care and care a lot.

But I’m not making money here. In fact my boss would probably rather that I spend my time on my Computer Science Teacher blog which actually has relevance to what I do for a living. This is my personal interest, clearly on my own time, blog. So traffic for the sake of traffic is not of much interest.

What would I rather have? I’d rather have regular readers who leave comments and trackbacks. Why them? Well, that is the way I will learn from other people. From comments and trackbacks I’ll meet and read people with similar interests. Perhaps I’ll get to read some different opinions, find new blogs to read and get different perspectives on things. Not those things would be added value.

So who would I like to link to me? On one level, everyone. Of course I want people to discover me. But practically speaking I would like other people with an interest in social computing. People like Liz Lawley and Lilia Efimova for example. I’ve learned a lot from them and people who come to my blog from theirs are likely to be people I’d be interested in hearing from. Dare Obasanjo would be another person. A lot of people read Dare’s blog and a lot of them are probably interested in social computing. There are others of course but you get the idea.

Solid communities with real dialogs are built by diverse contributors so people randomly coming here or coming for anyone’s link are welcome and I look forward to their visits. But at the same time people who are going to be around more often because of shared interests are the basic building blocks. That is why I think that links from closely related blogs (related by topic) are more valuable in the long run than an occasional link from a random A-List blog.

Poker Communities Online

Tue, 25 Oct 2005 22:26:34 GMT

For most of the last 11 years I have lived in the geek ghetto of cyberspace. Before that I was part of several online communities that while limited to employees of one company where world wide in membership and diverse in interests. I sort of forgot about that until recently. While I am sure there have been lots of vibrant communities on USENET, at various web forums and community sites and listservs I was pretty much unaware of them.

My eyes have started to open again in recent months. It started when I stumbled on a poker blog called the Tao of Poker. I don’t even remember how I found it but since I have started playing recreational poker (i.e. I don’t play with money I will miss) I was interested. One link led to another and now there are a number of poker focused blogs in my RSS reader.

On Sunday I participated in a free online poker tournament where the “price of admission” was having a blog. I blogged a bit about this a few weeks ago. There were over 1400 people in the tournament. Think about that. There were over 1400 bloggers who found out about this tournament (How? By being part of the community!) and signed up to participate in a bloggers only event. That is community. Lots of these bloggers link to one another of course. The side chat at my table included a number of people telling other players that they read their blogs.

It’s probably not so surprising that there is a large poker blogging community. Poker is big on TV these days and for many people the only way to play is online. Some of the most famous poker players got their start, and continue to play, online. Poker players, like most people with an interest, like to talk about what they like to do. And since they are online for their game and the people they are most likely to want to talk to are also online poker blogs are a natural.

Now I’m thinking there are other groups I need to go looking for.

Blogging the way it should be

Sun, 16 Oct 2005 01:58:58 GMT

Maryam writes about her first two weeks of blogging. It looks like it has been a good experience so far. I would have to say that my experiences mirror hers. It has been amazing at the people who have replied with comments to my little blog out on the long tail. I hope we (the blogosphere) never loses this small town, down home, everybody is worth listening to and being treated with respect sort of feel.

OK, yeah, I know that it doesn't always work that way. There are disagreements, flame wars, and nasty back and forth in the blogosphere. But that is not the default situation. By default things start nice and you almost have to work at getting the fights started. Well as long as you avoid politics, religion and Linux (or Apple) v. Microsoft.

Quote

New Kid on the Blog: My First Two Weeks in Blogosphere

Can’t believe it’s been two weeks that I have started blogging and what fun it has been! Even in the first two weeks, I am beginning to realize, from personal experience, what a powerful tool blogging can be. I am amazed by how friendly all the neighborhood kids, even the most popular ones are. As soon as you walk out, they come one by one, take your hands and ask you to play. You go out with shaking hands, nervous and alone, baring your soul out: Here, this is my post. Tell me what you think?

It feels as if somehow I walked into the best party in town. Every one is smiling at me. They walk over and we share stories. I am meeting so many new people and through their blogs they open all kinds of new worlds to me and in turn they listen to my stories. Friends I had lost touch with, friends I haven't seen for a while, all come over and welcome me. No longer limited by time and space, the world is for me to take on.

What are my friends reading today?

Sat, 24 Sep 2005 16:16:08 GMT

I had a conversation with a friend the other day who said that he didn’t subscribe to any blogs. He reads blogs only when someone, one of his friends usually, sends him a link and recommends it. I don’t think he is unique either. I think there are probably a lot of people who know about blogs, appreciate blogs to some extent, but who just have different priorities and ways of functioning that doesn’t leave room for “full participation” in the blogosphere.

The same day I talked to someone else, Liz Lawley, who is much more deeply involved in blogging who said that they are more interested in the blog recommendations of her friends than in the recommendations of famous and influential bloggers. Not only that but she is more interested in what her friends are reading than what is the popular topic of the day in the Internet. That certainly makes sense to me. There are people who think that because “everyone is talking about it” that “it” must be important but I’m not in that group. What is important to my friends, which may or may not be what “everyone” is finding important, is important to me if only because they are important to me.

I follow links from other bloggers on a fairly regular basis. But at the same time if a friend, someone I know and who knows me, sends me a recommendation I almost always follow it. It’s a lot more personal a recommendation. There doesn’t seem to be an easy way to capture what links/blogs/etc my friends are reading though. It would be nice to automatically see what my friends are reading. Even better would be if they could rate things and have those ratings shared to their group.

Talking about To Bulldoze or not to Bulldoze? The Future of Off Topic Discussions at gotdotnet

Fri, 16 Sep 2005 19:28:08 GMT

Online communities often have discussions that wander off the topic that the community was created to discuss. A common solution is to create a side or sub forum for the discussion of things that just don't fit. The idea is that you move those discussions off to the side and let the main group discuss the main topic. It often, I dare say usually, works. But it causes other problems. Abusive behavior, profanity, flame wars, and generally the sort of mess that comes out when some people decide that either there are (or should not) be any rules or that they are in a space when the rules don't matter. In short these spaces can become a management nightmare.

Korby Parnell talks about one such space in his blog. What do you do when the business value does not justify the expense in time, effort and frustration of managing an off topic forum? Do you kill it? Or do you try to find a new may of managing it? In an ideal world I think I'd like to just kill it, tell people to grow up, and move on. But that doesn't always work. Often the behavior that caused the initial creation of the off topics forum (off topic discussions in the main forums) just returns. The cycle has the potential to start all over again. So maybe there needs to be some looking into an alternative way of managing the forum.

One option is to recruit volunteers. This is tempting because it usually means low cost. But at the same time there are unsettled matters of liability when things go wrong (and they will) and authority. Plus of course when you ask for volunteers your options are to "take it or leave it" in picking people to run things. If you get good people, generally these would be responsible people who already have a reputation for fairness and honesty in the community, this can work. I have seen it work in the past. But it's not as easy for management to live with as closing the group completely.

- Alfred Thompson

Quote

Korby Parnell's Gotdotnet Wunderkammer : To Bulldoze or not to Bulldoze? The Future of Off Topic Discussions
Every community has its dirty back alleys, seedy joints, mean streets or, like Amsterdam, a Red Light District.
In the gotdotnet community, our seedy joint is the Off Topic Discussions message board. This un-moderated discussion has included a wide range of sometimes contentious but always interesting discussions and debates. For several years, the gotdotnet team has been content to let the discussion map its own course. We have not condoned abusive behavior but we have not aggressively cracked down on the trolls either. Additionally, we have neither the resources nor the inclination to provide active moderation. Thus to my question:
To bulldoze or not to bulldoze?
From a business perspective, the calculable ROI of this discussion board, if ever there was any, has disappeared. Frankly, it’s an administrative burden.
From a community perspective, this decision is anything but clear. If I order the demolition of Off Topic Discussions, what will the consequences be? Could the effect be to drive away positive contributors as well as the few bad actors?

Ron Caron on Community

Sat, 13 Aug 2005 17:56:47 GMT

Ron Caron has a really interesting discussion on community. [Found via Josh Ledgard] One of the things that comes out in Ron's blog is that he is really interested in spreading knowledge though online community. He also sees community as a vital interest for Microsoft. I think that this idea, the importance of community, has been around for years to some degree. User groups have been around for years and years in the computer industry. When I worked for Digital I know that the company thought of DECUS (Digital Equipment Corporation User Group) as of vital interest for that company. Much money was spent to support it and development groups put a lot of time and effort into supporting their customers.

The advent of online communities has allowed companies who care about supporting their customers to reach even more customers and include them in community. I’m not convinced that caring about community and customers is all that easy to fake. Company employees who blog or otherwise contribute to online communities have to want to do it. And they have to have a genuine caring about their customers. I think that drafting people to do this will most often backfire. Even online I think people can tell who really wants to help and who really wants to be part of a community.

That’s why I think that ghost written blogs or fake character blogs are never going to be community builders. Fun perhaps and maybe reasonable advertising gimmicks but in the long run I think that what many people really want is the feeling that a company cares about them as an individual.

Quote: What is Community?

Community in general is a very broad concept, but all technical communities share three common characteristics:

Community Members. Technical communities cannot exist without community members. People and the relationships they form create the social fabric that holds the community together. Without the discourse among community members, a community simply doesn’t exist.
A Domain. Technical communities focus on a particular domain, which is the common interest shared by all community members and represents the realm of possibilities. The domain also gives the community a common identity and sense of purpose. Because the scope of a domain can vary, communities can exist within communities as the level of specificity increases.
A Body of Knowledge. Technical communities enjoy an ever-expanding body of knowledge. The core purpose of a technical community is to develop knowledge about the domain and share it with community members. To me, content is simply the persistence of community knowledge.

Why do you answer questions online?

Fri, 12 Aug 2005 16:52:59 GMT

Josh Ledgard asks an interesting question on his blog. The question is “why do you answer questions online?” replies in the comments are interesting.

My first answer to this question was "because I can." But that is sort of flip and not really the whole story. I find that I lack a certain amount of self-control when it comes to questions online. Somehow if I know the answer I feel compelled to answer. But honestly I answer a lot of questions that I have to look up the answers for. I think that I do it because it just feels good to help people out with answers. So feeling good about myself is probably the main thing.

I’ve been answering questions online for years. Notes conferences, USENET newsgroups, online forums, blogs, list servers, you name it. It feels good. On some level I also hope that by filling the pipeline with answers that people will answer my questions when I have them. And by and large I have had a lot of questions answered online over the years. So there is mutual benifit for answering questions online.

Sometimes one can even develop a sort of minor fame and attention from answering questions online. One of the more formal paths that takes is Microsoft’s MVP program. I was actually invited to be an MVP which was quite flattering. There are some real benefits to that program so in a sense that is a tangible reward for helping a lot of people by answering questions. I had to turn it down though because I had already accepted an offer to be a full-time Microsoft employee.

I’ve seen some other “fame” over the years. More than once I have met people in real life and they have asked me if I was “the Alfred Thompson from [some online community].” Some of these people have actually sought me out. I can not deny that those events have fed my ego and served as a huge incentive to keep answering questions. [Side suggestion: if there is someone who has helped you out online find a way to say thank you. Send them an email or something.]

Another question I would like to see people answer is “why don’t you answer questions online?” I suspect that getting answers to that question online may be a bit harder to do. On the other hand I think that most people don’t answer just because they do not feel competent. They are unsure if they really know the answer or worry that there is a better one out there. They don’t realize that sometimes a close answer if enough and that a close answer is better than none at all. Other people are just shy. I think that if they tried it they would like it.

On the other hand there are always the people who are going to pick on people for answering differently (wrong or other wise) and those people do not help the community. Not sure what you can do about them though. Except perhaps that if people ignore them and support the people who try to be helpful the culture will move in the right direction.

-Alfred Thompson

Talking about Creating Passionate Users: Building a successful online community

Thu, 30 Jun 2005 18:18:28 GMT

The blog entry on creating "Passionate Users" (small bit quoted below) seems to have gotten a lot of attention on the blogosphere of late. The whole entry is a good read and makes some good points. One of them is that you need rules in an online community. In many ways, the type of rules you have will determine the type of community that you get. There is a lot of talk on the Internet about "free speech" but people are far from complete agreement about what that means. Or more importantly what that should mean.

There are some people who think that anything should be allowed including profanity, racist/sexist/etc comments, insults, and lots of other talk that would be considered bad form in “polite society.” Well perhaps there are places for all of those things. That doesn’t mean that every place is for that sort of thing.

I personally don’t like profanity for example. If I am at a social gathering where profanity gets out of hand I may get uncomfortable enough to leave. The same is true of an online community. So a community with a lot of profanity is not likely to have me as a member. Is that asking for censorship? I think not. Rather it is about letting me have choice of association. Likewise if I am part of a community that doesn’t like profanity and someone joins who wants to use profanity a lot and we ask them to leave that is also not censorship. It is the right of association with who we want. They are still free to use what ever language they want some place else. That is just one example or course.

A community has a right to set standards of behavior, either formally or informally. Those standards should not be forced on the community by external forces. On the Internet attempting to enforce standards externally is likely to result in a community “moving” to avoid the whole thing.

Good communities, even or perhaps especially those with passionate users, will have standards. The standards for successful communities will often have some rules about how to treat newcomers to the group, how to treat dissidents, and who will enforce the rules. Sure there will be wild and woolly communities (Slashdot comes to mind) and they may even be successful. But they’ll attract a whole different sort of people from those who want a “safer” place to talk.

BTW It is important to remember that different does not always mean better or worse. Sometimes it just means different.

- Alfred Thompson

Quote

Creating Passionate Users: Building a successful online community

So how did Javaranch do it? (Oh yeah, they did win a 2003 award that night, and the next year as well, beating out Sun's java.net and Microsoft for a 2004 Jolt award.)
They did it by being passionately, single-mindedly, ferociously committed to enforcing one rule: "Be Friendly."

Not that you can't have a huge community without that rule... slashdot is the perfect example. But if you're trying to inspire passionate users, I believe that enforcing a "Be Friendly" rule can be one of the best moves for long-term growth and retention of the community.

Talking about blogsperiment: Blogs versus Discussion Boards

Sun, 26 Jun 2005 03:12:03 GMT

Scott Adams pointed to an interesting discussion about the differences between blogs and discussion boards. Now I happen to like discussion boards. They do have some problems which this post does reference. But I also think that with the right community mix and some active and responsible leadership (sometimes called moderators) they can work very well.

It seems as though discussion boards are falling behind the technology though and this is moving them even more out of favor except for specific circumstances. The Microsoft Technical Forums are an example of discussion groups for product support that have a real future. I believe that community develops as strongly in such forums just as often as in pure blogging sites. But if there were some innovative people looking to really improve the technology behind them they would have a future beyond what they seem to have today.

- Alfred Thompson

Quote

blogsperiment: Blogs versus Discussion Boards
I've been thinking again about blogs versus discussion boards. I have always been very anti-discussion boards because personally I don't like them as a reader or user. I find them aesthetically uninviting and their folded in structure always makes me want to give up.

Comment and Trackback based blogging community

Thu, 26 May 2005 15:58:39 GMT

Scott Adams asks in a comment if I am forgetting the communities that build up around comments and trackbacks. And to be honest I think I underestimated the power of those tools when I wrote the article he comments on.

I am amazed at how often the referrer logs for this blog show that people are arriving by following a link in a comment I have left or a trackback that I have set. So it has become clear to me that leaving comments and setting trackbacks does connect different blogs. Clearly there is a lot of dialogue and even multi-way conversations going on because of these tools.

The thing I am not sure about yet is if these links create a community. I think they link communities to some degree. Clearly they link individuals as well (the community links revolve around those individuals.) But how tight are these links? Do they expand beyond a single topic or group of blogs? In some cases I think not. In other cases where the authors of the blogs involved have multiple interests or a single broad interest perhaps yes. In those latter cases the number of cross comments/trackbacks can easily grow into a regular event. When does it become community?

I am wondering where the read only people fit in on all this by the way. If I comment on a blog or someone else comments on my blog (in my own blog or by leaving a comment on the other blog) I frequently also subscribe to their blog. So that connection is made. But do the people who follow the link from my blog to the blog of someone who comments on it also subscribe to the new blog? Is that even important? I’m not sure.

I happen to think that the people who only read are important to the community. They are important for several reasons. One is that sooner or later they may find something they have to comment on. The less someone has to say the more important it is to listen when they do speak. Secondly I think that the read count can serve as encouragement for the blogger. Oh sure most of us like to think it is not important how many people read us but every now and again it does feel good to know that one is not shouting into an empty room. And there are intangible reasons that I don't know how to explain. But I digress.

So what is a community of bloggers? How dependent is it on tools built into the software for connecting people? I think that comments are the most important tool. Comments should always allow the ability to link to the person who comments. They should link to their blog or their web site or what ever. It should of course be their option not to link at all. I think that linking is the bond that builds community in blogging however. BTW I do understand that site that require some sort of sign in, and MSN Spaces if far from the only one of those, does limit commenting. That is an issue I don’t have an easy answer for. Comment and even trackback spam are huge problems. I spend time several times a week deleting trackback spam because I leave trackbacks open to sites outside MSN Spaces.

Speaking of trackbacks, if comments are the minimum trackbacks are also useful when used honestly. More important though are subscription tools. These can be as simple as easy links on the web page for web access or more complicated like tools to add RSS or Atom feeds to an aggregator. I think that it is also a good idea to make it easy for people, at their option, to tell others which blogs they read. There is a tool for that which someone has written. I mean to try it soon. Maybe today. Although I sure hope that MSN Spaces adds one of their own that lets me add at least MSN Spaces blogs somewhat automatically.

Clearly there is still growth in what constitutes blog communities. While some would like to say the revolution is over I think there is still change coming.

- Alfred Thompson

How important is RSS/Atom to online communities?

Mon, 23 May 2005 00:26:58 GMT

Lately there has been a lot of discussion about the importance of RSS (or Atom if you read Bob Wyman) syndication. It does seem like there are a growing number of uses for syndication using one or both of those two protocols. But I wonder just how important they are for small community sites.

Let me explain what I mean. Sites like Live Journal, theSpoke and others have small groups of people who form communities around blogs at that site. For example I have a blog at theSpoke that is read by a number of people. There are perhaps 80-100 people who read it in the course of a week. There are also about 100 blogs at theSpoke that I read regularly. Of those 100 blogs perhaps 5 to 10 are updated on any given day. I don’t use a blog aggregator to read any of those blogs. I doubt that many people use an aggregator to read mine.

I read blogs at theSpoke by using the information at my blog that is available using a web browser. Since the blogs I follow are listed in order of most recent update it is easy to read the most current entries. I tend to comment a lot (and a lot of people comment on my blog there) and it is pretty easy to do so using my web browser. Using an aggregator would just get in the way. I suspect that most other people at theSpoke operate the same way.

So these small little micro communities may not be that dependent on syndication. What they are more dependent on is features built into the site that let users track and navigate to the blogs they are interested in. Blogs at these sites seem to have a lot of fairly trivial (i.e. chatty, relaxed, one liners, etc.) comments. This sort of light weight communication makes for relationships.

The A-list bloggers do not build the same sort of community around their blogs. Clearly there is a community, probably more than one, of these A-list bloggers. They link to each other and comment on each other’s blogs a great deal. They also seem to have meetings in “real life” at conferences, geek dinners and other events. However, the majority of the people who comment on these blogs do not seem to form the sort of community that exists in sites that have community as a focus.

I think that connectors, people like Robert Scoble who follows over 1,300 blogs, are totally dependent on syndication. They could not follow that many blogs nor could they have as many readers as they do without syndication. But for the millions of people who just want to follow a few blogs and be followed by a couple of people just how important is syndication? Why can’t they get by with a web browser.

I should add that I expect an increasing number of people to use aggregators. They’ll use them to keep up with news, big name bloggers, and lots of other read-only data sources. But for their little community why will they bother?

- Alfred Thompson

Social Computing Symposium day 2

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 19:45:19 GMT

Dave Weinberger seems to be doing the most blogging from the Social Computing Symposium that Microsoft Research is hosting. It seems like a lot of good stuff is going on.

I especially wish I could have been there for Robert Kraut's (Carnegie Mellon) talk. I'm going to look and see if I can find some of his papers online. I expect the talks will be available online at some point as well. I'll go looking for his.

I have been lurking on the irc channel most of the day. It's interesting reading people chat about a talk that I myself can't hear. Not having context from stuff going on in the room I do not expect to say anything but it is sort of like being there. Right? :-)

- Alfred Thompson

Talking about Martha's poncho: An amazing yarn - BusinessWeek Online - MSNBC.com

Tue, 19 Apr 2005 01:46:18 GMT

I always thought that yarn and knitting companies were old-fashioned. I mean it is an old-fashioned sort of activity right? Well, apparently not. The story linked to below is about how a company Lion Brand Yarn, responded – and responded quickly – to requests from their customers.

Lion Brand has a community built around their products and using their web site, email news letters and email (13,000 a month) from their customers. They use the web site and newsletter to talk to their customers. At the same time they receive a lot of email from their customers talking to them. By all appearances they listen and respond to those customer emails in a positive way. In short they look to find ways to support their customers. Thirdly, they also let their customers talk to each other.

They publish bits and suggestions from their customers on their web site. There is a Customer’s Gallery where they show pictures of projects created by their customers. In short they are working hard to build a community. They believe they are helping their product sell of course. But it’s not all about charging for things or locking customers in to their product. What they are trying to do is to create good will by building a community. The result is a win for everyone.

- Alfred Thompson

Quote

Martha's poncho: An amazing yarn - BusinessWeek Online - MSNBC.com

Q: How did you build that loyalty?

A: The company owner, David Blumenthal, has a son who was a high school student in 1995, and he built a very basic Web site for us. Since then, we've been slowly building and improving. The site teaches people how to knit and crochet, answers questions, tells inspiring stories from readers, offers hints and tips, and lets people know about opportunities to knit and crochet for charity. It's like having a friend who sits and works with you.

We have a very active consumer community of about 370,000 that subscribes to our weekly newsletter. We get about 13,000 e-mails a month, and we have a customized system that receives them and sorts them by category. A dozen of our staff members spend at least part of their time answering those e-mails.

Making the physical connection

Sat, 16 Apr 2005 22:39:54 GMT

I've long believed that face to face meetings make for stronger online communities. Face to face meetings are not always possible of course. Even when they are getting an entire community together at one time is pretty much impossible except for very small communities.

Still I think that the connection between people can become stronger when there is a sense of where someone is in the real world. Last week I had a chat (MSN Messenger) with a college student in China. One of the things we did was to exchange information about where we both live. China and the US are of course large countries. It was nice to learn that we both live near the ocean. Different oceans of course and he lives a lot closer to the ocean than I do but it was a connection. I find that one of the first things I want to know, especially when a connection becomes truly bi-directional through instant messaging or email, is where someone lives. Perhaps that need is not universal but it is strong in me.

That is one of the reasons that the BlogMap project so intrigues me. For those of you who are not familiar with it, BlogMap lets you “geo-code your blog, browse already geo-coded blogs and search for blogs.” You can search for specific blogs or look for other blogs in a specific geography. I was able to add the BlogMap to one of my other blogs. I wish I could figure out a way to add it to this one.

I have found some interesting blogs by looking at the blogs near me. Some of them I now subscribe to. In several cases I have just felt a bit more of a connection because I know that person is geographically close. For other bloggers, not in my immediate area, it somehow feels like I know the person a bit better because I have a sense of where they are geographically. It’s an nice way to make more of a connection with the community – no matter how you define “community.” Try it - have some fun with it.

- Alfred Thompson

Note that BlogMap was created by Chandu Thota of Microsoft's MapPoint team.

Who is active and why?

Wed, 13 Apr 2005 11:30:34 GMT

MSN Spaces had 4.5 million spaces as of when it left beta but there have been a few comments along the lines of how few are updated. Dare Obasanjo has a response that compares MSN Spaces rate of updated blogs with Live Journal’s. He concludes that MSN Spaces is competitive with LJ and I would have to agree. This is especially true because I think LJ has both some nice tools to tie blogs together as a community and a head start on building that community.

Paul Britton wishes that MSN Spaces had released a monthly tally rather than a daily tally. That is another issue I have with a lot of the statistics being released – they are too limited. Very few people update every day. There just isn’t always that much to say every day. Oh sure there are days when it just seems like things keep popping up that you want to talk about and one may have several posts. But the next day one may be too busy or just not have anything to say.

I think that one of the things that encourage people to blog is a feeling that they are connecting to people. I suspect that people who have some tangible confirmation that they are being read tend to write more. One of the features of LJ is the Friends system. This lets a user add other LJ blogs to a list of friends. There is also a “Friends of” list that shows who has added a journal to their friends list. This lets users track their friends’ journals/blogs more easily. But it does something else – it lets people know who is reading who. If your “Friend of” list grows you know that someone is watching. Now of course maybe they are not reading regularly but you can believe that they are if you want. This is encouragement.

The community site theSpoke has a similar system. Users can subscribe to blogs and those blogs will show up on a list called “Blogs I read” which is public. A user who is logged in will see a list called “Subscribed to my blog.” theSpoke also shows a read count to a logged in user reading their own blog. Both combine to let someone know that what they are writing is being read. It’s positive reinforcement.

These friend systems also encourage people to read more blogs. If you enjoy someone’s blog than you are likely to read, at least once, the blogs of some of their listed friends. And I think that a lot of people are going to go out of their way to read the blogs of those people who read theirs. From this sort of thing communities grow and self reinforce writing and commenting activities. I believe that as MSN Spaces continues to add features that allow users to connect more easily (and that people better understand and use the ones that exist already) that the write rate will increase.

Speaking of features! Have you checked the statistics page for your MSN Spaces lately? It’s a tab under the Settings page. While it used to only show web views and references it now shows RSS views as well. So if people are reading your blog using RSS aggregators you will see more activity there.

By the way, I’m a person who just loves statistics. I think they help understand a lot of things. I would love to see some statistics around how large the average Live Journal community is. That is to say what is the average number of friends for a Live Journal blog? The same numbers for theSpoke would be interesting as well. In fact I’d just like to see someone do a study of any community site with that sort of tool. I’d also like to see a study that looked at connections between those little communities. I suspect that most people have an average (+ or – a standard deviation or two) number of friends/readers but that there are some people who connect groups who are way outside the normal range. Now those would be interesting people to study.

- Alfred Thompson

Talking about Weblogg-ed - Blogging vs. Journaling...Again

Mon, 11 Apr 2005 23:02:50 GMT

I ran into an interesting discussion of blogs and journals. There is a lot of useful discussion in the comments. The question is about the difference between a journal and a blog. Both use the same tools and they share many of the same characteristics. Linking though is generally considered a key component of a blog. In fact many of the most popular and dare I say it famous blogs consist of little more than links.

Most of the long tail of blogging is different from the A list though. One of the differences, I suspect, is the link to original content ratio. I’m not sure what sort of ratio is the cut off point between a journal and a blog.

Will in his post (quoted below) also talks about “information gathering, critical thinking, … annotative writing skills” as being key attributes to the weblog equation. And maybe they are useful as a way to make such distinctions. But I am not so sure it matters. Nor am I sure that a journal with a lot of introspection does not include a lot of information gathering and critical thinking even if it is information about the author.

I also think that many people have sites that go both ways. That is to say that some entries are loaded with links and thoughtful analysis of some issue while other entries are pictures of flowers or chatting about some day in the life of. Does the site go back and forth between a blog and a journal depending on a particular entry? You can see that sort of things in “A list” sites that few would insist were wrongly names blogs.

I think that the differences between journals and blogs are sufficiently small that in most cases they can be used as synonyms. At least in casual conversation. In a serious study maybe it becomes important but than you have to have a clear way of differentiating the two. Subjective things like “information gathering, critical thinking, … annotative writing skills” may not practical to categorize large numbers of entries. The question than becomes “is links to text ratio good enough?” Or perhaps “why is the distinction important?”

I read a number of "kids blogs" or journals. Yes, some of them are "just" online journals that are all about doing a brain or emotions dump. But many of them are indisputably blogs.

I read a number of "kids blogs" or journals. Yes, some of them are "just" online journals that are all about doing a brain or emotions dump. But many of them are indisputably blogs. But in either case most of them are about a conversation. That is to say that others are reading the post and commenting on it. In some sense links are just one way of having a conversation. So a “journal” entry that starts a conversation can be just as meaningful, if not more so, than a link that may never be followed. While some see links as the key part of a blog I am starting to like the idea that the conversation is the key.

- Alfred Thompson

After rereading this I think it seems a bit random still. That’s a clear sign to me that I have more thinking to do on the issue. I hope you don’t mind that and I welcome your comments to help me with the thinking process.

Quote

Weblogg-ed - The Read/Write Web in the Classroom : Blogging vs. Journaling...Again

Here's a contest. Really. It's easy. Show me how kids using Xanga are blogging. I'm sure there must be some students actually employing all of the information gathering, critical thinking, linking, and annotative writing skills that Weblogs bring to the equation

Author Blogs

Sun, 10 Apr 2005 15:35:16 GMT

I read an interesting blog by Joe Wikert the other day that talks about blogs for authors. He suggests that blogs can be a way for authors to enhance and extend their books. This seems like an idea that is growing. There is the case of Robert Scoble’s “The Red Couch” where he is blogging his book as it is being written. Several years ago “The Cluetrain Manifesto” grew out of a blog type of web site. The three of the authors run their own independent blogs today but they all build upon and extend the ideas from that book. No doubt that Tom Peters and his organization see their group blog as an extension of their books as well as their lectures and consulting. So there are a number of good examples of blogs enhancing non-fiction books. But what of fiction?

It’s easy to write off fiction as a genre that can’t really take advantage of this sort of thing but I would disagree. The Baen publishing company (science fiction) has a thriving online community called Baen's Bar built around their authors. Science fiction does have a long history of fan communities of course so this should be no surprise. But what surprises me is that publishers of other genre have not looked to take advantage of the Internet to build their own online communities.

There are author web sites for many authors of course. There are some small aspects of interactivity at Dan Brown’s (The DaVinci Code and others) web site but not real community aspect. The Left Behind books have a web site that allows for contributing information and of course reading (static) information about the books but not ongoing community building opportunities. These are missed opportunities I think.

I think that when a book, or a series of books, becomes important to a person the chance to relate to others who have that same interest can be a big deal. Not just for non fiction for fiction as well. An author who hopes to sell more books, be it the next in a series or a new edition or a new book on a new topic, will benefit from a community that will promote the book for them. I expect that more and more authors and publishers will take advantage of this over time.

- Alfred Thompson

Talking about NOTES

Fri, 08 Apr 2005 22:24:59 GMT

My friend Andy Leslie who I met online through DEC Notes many years ago has some reminisces from the old days (i.e. back when we both worked for Digital Equipment). I think he has the timing of the creation of CTNotes and VMSNotes (conferences for the CT and VMS products) backwards (I wound not bet against him though) but generally I think he's got things right. Right being defined as “how I remember them.” Of course any community has people who remember things a bit differently coming from different points of view and different backgrounds. That’s what makes online communities as real as “meat space” communities.

- Alfred Thompson

Quote

NOTES
Throughout the 1980's, I was a member of the thriving NOTErs community, using the tool for support of both the technical and personal variety. I made friends and enemies, debated existentialism and "DO Key=RETURN" (you had to be there) and, when I visited any DEC facility in the world (USA, Germany, France, Italy etc, - I was based in the UK), set up parties and meetings with friends and colleagues I had only ever met electronically. We were citizens of a culture, not of nations and as such we cleaved together despite differences in our ages, jobs and country.

Social Computing has been around for a while

Mon, 07 Mar 2005 02:41:39 GMT

I met someone the other day who I’ve been discussing things with for probably over 15 years. I’m not sure we’ve ever met in person before. As we talked we recalled some parties that we were both at but they were so long ago we can’t remember if we actually talked at them. They were big parties and there were a lot of people we knew but were meeting for the first time at these parties. Confused?

About 20 years ago I first got started with online communities. These communities were limited to employees from a single company (Digital Equipment) and used a proprietary piece of software called Notes. The person I met the other day is someone I know from the remains of that once vast international community. I happened to be in his home town on vacation and we decided to meet face to face.

This Notes product is not to be confused with Lotus Notes by the way. There were a couple of generations of this software with the last version being called DEC Notes and becoming a real product. Before that it was an informal project that was developed by people in their spare time. Now least you think this was a tiny little community let me tell you about it.

I was responsible for maintaining the list of computer conferences company-wide for a couple of years. There were over 1,000 of these conferences on that list when I handed it off to some one else to maintain. There were close to 8,000 that were not on the list because they were private (limited to small groups) and there were 10s of thousands of users of these communities in over 20 countries. I sent out updates to at least that many countries on a weekly basis.

Notes was (or rather is at it does still exist in isolated pockets) a client server application, text based, that worked over DECnet connections. (DECnet being Digital’s proprietary network architecture. It could also work over TCP/IP and there are (I have heard) some clients that do work that way. Notes was text based as so lacks some of the jazzy graphics things that modern internet users are used to. But even with this limitation it turns out to have been a fabulous tool for communication.

In some ways Notes is like some blogging applications in that it is very light weight, easy to learn and use and valued primarily for its ability to let people express themselves.

So many things that seem to be new are things that were part of the Notes community for years before home Internet connections became place. For almost 10 years before home Internet became common place and most people who had Internet connections had them at work or university the Notes community had “Notes parties.” Notes parties were very much like today’s geek dinners. The community had “A list” Noters, though we did not use the term, who were people famous for their personality, contributions to Notes development or some combination of the two. Even the current issue at many companies around blogging policies is reminiscent of “Notes policy” discussions I took part in at Digital over a dozen years ago.

The truly sad thing is that this important history is all but unknown to today’s influentials in social computing. I wish those of us who were involved had recorded more of what was going on at the time.

Social Computing Symposium 2005

Mon, 14 Feb 2005 19:03:02 GMT

Microsfot Research is holding their second Social Computing Symposium on April 25-26. I am hoping to go. Still need to write and send in my position paper though.

I thought I should point out that the Social Computing Symposium 2004 presentations are online.

Web forums, listservers and newsgroup Communities

Wed, 15 Dec 2004 16:00:21 GMT

Web forums, listservers and newsgroups have a lot of similarities as communities. Both tend to have a large number of people who only read in comparison to the number of people who actually write to them.

Some years ago I was very involved in a large number of DEC Notes computer conferences. DEC Notes was a network application that operated in much the same way as web forums do today. One of the things that we found with those groups was that there were between 7 and 10 people who only read (never wrote) for every one person who wrote to the conference. I suspect that the numbers are similar for web forums, listservers and newsgroups today. I am not sure about newsgroups. The ratio may be the same or different but is likely to be the same. (Gut feel - I wish I had data but I don’t.)

There tends also to be some people who contribute a lot to a group and others who contribute seldom, perhaps once or twice. In between there is a range of participation but the largest percentage of contributions are made by a small number of people.

In my essay about building online communities I identified one of these types of heavy contributors as “Question answeres. ” This is especially the case in groups that have grown up to support technical questions. Newsgroups that are built around Microsoft products often have a few people who spend a large amount of time, and make a lot of entries, answering the questions of other members of the community. The questioner may join the group only for a short time to ask a particular question or work a specific issue. Or they may be someone who lurks, learning new things from other people’s questions, and occasionally asking a question that others are not asking for them. The answerers though tend to be around for long periods of time. In Microsoft related newsgroups or web forums those people are often awarded special recognition as Microsoft MVPs.

While there are rewards for reaching MVP status most awardees would probably do what they do just for the sake of helping others. But then people helping others is part of what defines a community so these are important people.

No matter if the community is a web forum, a news group or a listserver, regular participants establish reputations. Some reputations are good, some are bad and some are just different. Knowing the key people is all part of understanding any type of community – online or offline.

Alfred Thompson the Cyberspace People Watcher: Community

The World is My Neighborhood

How famous do you have to be to be in wikipedia?

Comments - is it about content or audience?

Hey let’s pick on the new guy!

The Reality of Real Life

Guest Book

Wikipedia edit wars?

Why I don’t care if Scoble links to me

Poker Communities Online

Blogging the way it should be

What *are* my friends reading today?

Talking about To Bulldoze or not to Bulldoze? The Future of Off Topic Discussions at gotdotnet

Ron Caron on Community

Why do you answer questions online?

Talking about Creating Passionate Users: Building a successful online community

They did it by being passionately, single-mindedly, ferociously committed to enforcing one rule: "Be Friendly."

Talking about blogsperiment: Blogs versus Discussion Boards

Comment and Trackback based blogging community

How important is RSS/Atom to online communities?

Social Computing Symposium day 2

Talking about Martha's poncho: An amazing yarn - BusinessWeek Online - MSNBC.com

Making the physical connection

Who is active and why?

Talking about Weblogg-ed - Blogging vs. Journaling...Again

Author Blogs

Talking about NOTES

Social Computing has been around for a while

Social Computing Symposium 2005

Web forums, listservers and newsgroup Communities

What are my friends reading today?