Mathew's comments - Latest Comments in Community is the hard part

Re: Community is the hard part

john — Wed, 16 May 2007 21:14:44 -0000

Some good points in the comments,

Seth, like Digg, I see both Guy's and Seth Godin's recent projects starting off with a built in audience.

However, there are other communities such as Piczo (and yes facebook) that's growing by building a community.

Re: Community is the hard part

Seth Finkelstein — Wed, 16 May 2007 05:13:20 -0000

Right, right ... an under-told aspect of the Digg story is that Kevin Rose was a minor tech celebrity, and so brought his *audience* - not "community", *audience* - to the site.

It can't be easy by definition - if the audience is one place, it can't be in another place (to a good approximation). Add in network effect (people being where others are), and the outcome is a very few big winner-take-all results. But hey, maybe the venture capitalists get pleasure from the act of spending money itself, maybe they're doing it for the joy and happiness of being in business (to be clear, this is riffing off what Z-listers get told when they point out how the blog game is rigged).

Re: Community is the hard part

Karoli — Wed, 16 May 2007 02:54:20 -0000

Ummm, and add a big DUH to my comment above. It always pays to read all links before finishing comment. I get where you were correlating community to the JPG issues now. I've posted my response on Flickr and my own blog.

Re: Community is the hard part

Karoli — Wed, 16 May 2007 02:36:51 -0000

I am shocked about JPG mag. I've submitted for the last three issues (none accepted, but still fun), and the motivation for doing so was knowing that Heather was involved. This news is most unwelcome.

I don't see community as being at the heart of the JPG coup, but certainly the Digg debacle and Newsvine's lackluster participation level has community at the heart of it.

I've participated in both of these communities. Digg's community is so far out of control that I doubt it can be reined in at this point. Community is usually a mirror of its leadership and Digg is no exception. Kevin Rose has made a point out of capitalizing on his "power to the people and pirates" hacker image, and the Digg community mirrors that.

Newsvine, on the other hand, had more of a problem with how the site itself worked than the community as a whole. When Newsvine first launched, it seemed to want submissions of MSM stories and was aiming at aggregating them. Submissions of user-generated content never seemed to climb beyond that user's page, and the site itself was very difficult to navigate.

Since part of my "real life" job involves online communities, I tend to try everything and see what sticks. In Digg's case, the fundamental concept is great, but the community is large and unruly. In Newsvine's case, there is some great potential for community-building but they need people to do it.

Communities don't grow themselves -- they need people committed to them to grow. This is what Heather Champ does so well at Flickr, and what she was trying to foster at JPG.

Re: Community is the hard part

engtech — Wed, 16 May 2007 00:29:34 -0000

I'm excited about avanoo.com

I got in the beta today, and I like what they're doing over there. Something different than other social sites.