Liveblogging at OCS2007

Hey there, this is my first, and probably last go at liveblogging. I'm out in Sonoma at ForumOne's Online Community Summit, a historically kickass conference on online community.

Jim Cashel has just started welcoming us. People are smart and the side conversations are fascinating as usual.

I'm a little dispirited about online community this year, not because it's not important, but because I no longer really think there's much point in separating "online community" from "online" in general. I worry that those of us who remain "online community" gurus will find ourselves outmoded. We'll continue talking earnestly about our topic while other folks shoot off and do interesting things without worrying too much about it. I hope the rest of the conference perks me up a bit.

Okay back to paying attention.

I'm back

It's been a godawful long time since I blogged in this venue. I may not be cut out for blogging. My excuse is that I've been working 7 day weeks and 14 hour days at a new company, and not on community stuff.
I've just managed to get all that work tidied away to the point where I'm no longer scrambling, so now I'm on to devising a community plan.

General guidelines for devising a community plan:

• Don't overthink - instead, keep production costs low and avoid the time-suck of market research
  
• Plan to be wrong the first time you build anything (i.e. build flexibility into your code and your plan
• Ignore most best practices, since your community will be comprised of different people than Yahoo's
• For Godsakes, try not to use the term community in outward facing text.

I may or may not be speaking on these topics elsewhere. I'll post about the seminar if I get invited.

Oh, in the shameless self-promotion area of this site, I'm featured as a "Face of eContent" this month. Astute readers may recognize the picture they're using.

SIIA brownbag

I recently spoke on a panel for an SIIA brownbag in Manhattan. The topic was "Tapping into User-generated Content".

The video is here.

I'm the goofy looking guy on the left. Somewhere along the line I seem to have developed facial expressions that make me look like I have a misaligned jaw.

Despite how uncomfortable I might look, I really enjoyed this speaking engagament. The other panelists were really sharp and I enjoyed chatting with them. I particularly like when we bounded off on a discussion of development and market research. I'll probably dedicate some lines of text to that in a later blog post.

In case you don't want to watch the video, our main message about that is "don't do so much market research".

SIIA was great. Ed Keating and Laura Davis were great hosts, and Heidi Cohen was a very capable moderator.

Buying a car . . . is not my idea of a good time.

So, until recently, I worked at ConsumerReports.org. Now that I'm moving to Reston, VA, just outside D.C., I have to have a car.

Although I built the autos user reviews for Consumer Reports, I've never owned a car before and I don't like them. I'm very unlike my recent coworkers at CR in this regard. When I asked for help buying a car I saw their eyes light up. When I told them I wanted one under $15K that I would use as little as possible, I got the distinct feeling that I was talking Greek.

The help they gave me was great - since the car writers there do actually care about the needs of all layers of consumer. Still, if someone comes to me with questions about what computer to buy, I'm much more interested in putting together a screaming fast multimedia Ono Sendai than something sensible and utilitarian.

Anyway, I'm now the proud owner of a terrifically macho light blue tiny car (2007 Honda Fit). Shut up, lots of tough guys have light blue cars.

Awesome. Or awesome if not for the NYS DMV. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that the DMV could be more efficient.

It's hard for even a reasonably bright person like me to navigate the obscure rules of the system. I think they should get really knowledgeable people to staff the phones and deal with questions well before people show up. Anytime you create an essentially artificial system for people to navigate, you're going to have to explain the rules to them. I called ahead and got one set of instructions for my admittedly arcane circumstances.

Then I showed up and got another set of directions (actually, the first guy I saw - kind of the traffic cop of the DMV - suggested I just cross my fingers and hope the desk clerk would let me get away with what I had to do). Finally, I got booted to a manager who actually knew what I needed to do. I'm still not certain I had all the right paperwork. I think he might have just taken pity on me.

Anyhow, I have a car now, and I hope to park it for the better part of a year under my new apartment building.

Here and gone

(pic by: smthng on flickr)

So, I've been doing a simply miserable job of keeping this blog updated. Apologies to my Largely Imaginary Audience.

Since the last time I posted, some things have popped up:

• I got a new job
• started moving to the D.C. area (my sister's boyfriend who lives with her in D.C. proper won't allow me to use "D.C." to refer to Reston, VA)
• bought a car
• and spoke at an SIIA brownbag in New York.

I'll post separately on all those things, probably, but I'll just use this space to say that being unemployed has been exhausting. I should have asked for another week off.

American Idol - what up?

So, this modest blog got a link from Helen A.S. Popkin's MSNBC story about American Idol and Sanjaya the other day.

Just to get full disclosure out of the way . . .

1. I know Helen outside of the Internet. She knew about what was in my blog already because we talk about Internet stuff.
   
2. American Idol makes me throw up in my own throat.
3. I don't really mind if you like or hate AI, that's not what this blog is about.
   

I could care less about the travesty that Howard Stern or Time's Person(s?) of the Year is wreaking on the popular show except that it illustrates some interesting trends in virtual communities.

So, in the unlikely event that you click over to this blog and read this post before commenting on Sanjaya, please follow these points of courtesy:

1. don't shout - no one likes shrill posts in ALL CAPS
2. challenge yourself to argue your point, not just state it - One poster for instance, tells us that "If you vote for Sanjaya, you are asking for everyone to boycott the next American Idol". Yeah? So? Is that important or bad? If so, why?
   

Sanjaya and the 1 percent

Building on an earlier post about "it's the user dummy", I'd like to point out what the ongoing journey of Sanjaya Malakar reveals about virtual communities.

Sanjaya is a fellow with hair and singing of equally dubious quality, and yet he persists on American Idol, prompting much hand-wringing from various quarters. This thanks (perhaps debatably) to the efforts of Howard Stern and his listeners.

What's interesting is that virtual communities can have big effects on the non-virtual world. That's not new, but this example highlights an interesting reason:

Virtual communities have no carrying-capacity for lurkers.

That is, while a community can have only so many active participants before it starts to schism or subdivide, there's no upper limit for the number of people who lurk. So, if these lurkers feel sufficiently like part of the community, their actions in service of a project dreamt up by more active members can have a huge impact.

Now, my argument relies on Stern's listeners being a virtual community, but I'll venture that that's not such a stretch. A lot of Howard Stern's success, I think, stems from how well he encourages audience members to think of themselves as part of his community. He talks to them well, occasionally plucks listeners from obscurity to feature them in ongoing roles, and generally does a better job of creating community around his show than other radio jockeys. I'd be interested to hear your takes on this in the comments.

So what's the takeaway? Well, a lot of the press about the 1% rule (not much of your community produces content), whether staid or er . . . not, focuses on the content producers, not the hidden power of the lurkers. I feel we need to take the lurkers more seriously. They may not be writing online novels or learned articles on the (amazing) cuttlefish, but perhaps they have better things to do than spend all afternoon blogging (for instance). They're still affecting the world around them; treat them with an according respect.