Latest project: TechSoup/CompuMentor
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September 19th, 2005 by Alex
My latest venture in the fabulous world of Web 2.0 is helping CompuMentor — home of TechSoup — set up an online community in conjunction with an event they are organizing for next spring. Job one? Use this post to check whether the aggregation is working.
What Google blog search doesn’t have
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September 14th, 2005 by Alex
Rob highlights its pros and cons. How could he forget to mention its gravest oversight: no rankings! Or is this a desperate hope that the ascendance of Google could change the domestic balance of power?
National Conversation now online
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September 14th, 2005 by Alex
Politics Online has launched theNational Conversation project, which aims at engaging Americans in dialogue about major national issues (in the first instance, 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina). I like the effort to encourage multimedia contributions, and to allow people to simply “agree or disagree” with key statements. But this seems like a project that would be ripe for a distributed strategy — i.e. allowing people to contribute comments by blogging them and aggregating those blog posts in via tagging and RSS. Perhaps that’s how the “share” feature will work once it’s up and running? The site is still beta so I’ll be curious to see how its functionality evolves.
10 ways RSS can help build online communities
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September 13th, 2005 by Alex
Non-governmental organizations seeking to strengthen relationships with members. Governments trying to reach out to citizens. Businesses hoping to engage and win the loyalty of customers. These are the kinds of challenges that bring people to the field of online dialogue and community-building — and that should encourage them to adopt RSS.
RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, a format for storing online content so that people — or web sites — can subscribe to and receive content as it’s updated. (For a more detailed explanation see my RSS mini-site.) RSS lets individual users “subscribe” to online content (”RSS feeds”) by using newsreaders (”feed readers”) that round up all the news from different sites and put it in one place. But RSS can also serve as the circulatory system for online communities by making it easy for web sites to share content with one another.
Marnie Webb’s great post on the ten reasons that non-profits should use RSS is a great crash course in the value of RSS. But it’s become clear that RSS has particular value in creating online communities — and not just non-profit communities, but potentially for-profit communities, too. So with a big nod to Marnie, let me suggest….
10 ways RSS can help build online communities
- Start in the middle. The biggest hurdle to creating an online community is the challenge of starting up a site without any content to draw people in. With RSS, you can create a site and immediately populate it with content that will interest the kind of people you’re hoping to engage.
- Safety in (small) numbers. Small communities are easier to create and sustain — but small online communities can have a hard time generating enough content to sustain their members’ interest. RSS makes it easy and efficient for people to set up sustainable micro-communities by aggregating (subscribing to) content on a given set of topics, rather than creating it from scratch. Fo example, the left-handed trombone players of Wyoming can have a thriving online community populated by RSS feeds about left-handedness, trombones, and Wyoming. (Sign me up!)
- Go to where the people are. Offline communities have long known that when you’re trying to recruit or build your community’s membership, you can’t wait for potential members to come to you; you have to go to them. RSS lets you apply that insight in the virtual world: instead of waiting for new community members to return to your site, your content can reach them — when and where it’s convenient for your readers.
- Put your members to work for you. Communities thrive when members participate actively. If your site makes effective use of RSS, your members can contribute content by streaming comments directly from their blogs to your site.
- Online community in 5 minutes a day. One obstacle to participating in online communities is the amount of time it can take to track a range of conversations across the many discussion boards and threads that can emerge within a single online community. RSS makes it easy to offer members a customizable dashboard where they see all the content and conversations that interest them as soon as they get to your site.
- Safety and diversity. It’s easy for online communities to become “echo chambers” in which people hear only the views of people who think the same way they do — in fact, one valuable kind of online community is just a safe space where people can talk with others who share their core values. RSS lets homogenous communities bring in content from people who think differently, and then review and discuss it within their safe space.
- Foster discussion, not chatter. For the same reason that online communities often become echo chambers, they can also become pretty lightweight. RSS feeds can inject substantive content into your community, encouraging your members to engage in meaningful dialogue instead of idle chit-chat.
- Look around you. Your community isn’t just the people who have registered on your site — it’s the broader community of people whose interests intersect with the interests or values of your members. RSS makes it easy to exchange content (like blog posts) with these related sites, so that your members can find one another.
- Plan for your demise. Many communities have a limited life span. Conference sites inspire great discussions that peter-out; contests or promotions produce a spike of interest that ultimately dissipates. By creating RSS-based relationships with other related sites, you hook your site into a larger community that can offer your members other possible homes if and when your site reaches the end of its useful life.
- Plan for your rebirth. Those other sites I was talking about? They don’t have to belong to other organizations. RSS makes it so easy to move content across micro-sites, it’s suddenly efficient for you to run multiple online communities that target different groups, interests or efforts. By the time one community winds down you’ll have another site and community well underway.
More love for Zagat
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September 6th, 2005 by Alex
Ah, the joys of the automatic reply. Zagat canceled my subscription as per my request, and here’s what their e-mail included:
If you have a moment, could you let us know why you decided to cancel?
Is there anything we can do to change your mind? We rely on customer
feedback to make improvements to the site and the overall customer
experience, so we’d truly appreciate any comments you might have.
Gosh, I am SO glad I took the time to share my views in that previous e-mail.
Zinging Zagat
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September 6th, 2005 by Alex
I’m going to resist turning this space into my own customer service department, but here’s another little skirmish in my own personal war on obnoxious web sites. Tonight’s target is Zagat, purveyors of other people’s opinions. Long before epinions and Trip Advisor figured out how to [not?] make money off of what other people think, Zagat had cornered the skinny book market with its trademark burgundy restaurant guidbooks.
Then the Internet came along with its promise of FREE MONEY and even more opinions and also FREE MONEY, and here Zagat’s has got this big stockpile of opinions all ready to be uploaded. It was a no-brainer for Zagat to create an online service, and for some time there was a glorious moment when you could surf through the Zagat guide and search for restaurants in your hometown by location or cuisine or service feature, and it was only when you wanted to do something really exotic like cross-reference restaurants by favourite ingredient that the nice Zagat folks would hit you up for cash.
Then it all went terribly wrong.
Now if you hit the Zagat site you’ll have a few minutes of delightful expectation as you review the wide variety of features you can easily search on. Go so far as to click one of those features, however, and what you’ll get is a big come-on to subscribe to their service.
As annoyed as I am by these unanticipated come-ons, I am even more annoyed by (a) bad food, (b) starvation, and (c) driving through a strange city in my pajamas, which is why I found myself taking eight (!!!) minutes tonight to complete the subscription form that granted me the privilege of 30 days of Zagat access for a mere $3.95. But that seemed like the fastest cheapest route to find good food that delivers in San Francisco, which is where I am now and for the next five days. Surely I can extract $3.95 worth of meal-hunting value in five days.
Hah! The restaurants that Zagat’s listed as offering delivery did not, in fact, offer delivery — at least not the first two we called before giving up. (Not very persistent, I admit, but maybe I would have felt more patient if I hadn’t spent eight minutes on the site registration process.)
But here’s the really cheeky part: Zagat’s confirmation e-mail notes that “For your convenience, your subscription will renew automatically until you tell us otherwise.”
Hmm…do blogs count as telling them otherwise? Maybe not. So here’s what I wrote:
YIKES! Please don’t renew my subscription. I’m guessing that “automatic renewal” is buried somewhere in your fine print but FYI other sites that do automatic renewal offer it as an opt-in option, not an opt-out.
And actually wasn’t very happy with even my one-shot $3.95 subscription. Bought it so I could check into which restaurants offer delivery in SanFran (I’m here on vacation)…the restaurants you list as delivering don’t necessarily (I called 2 then gave up.)
Also while I’m at it can I say that it’s very unusual for a site to offer links that are viewable to subscribers only without labeling them as such? I know you’re trying to drive subscriptions but it more or less violates netiquette standards. If you’ve got subscribers-only features, label them as such; don’t offer them as links and then smack me in the face with a subscription come-on.
Gosh, I can’t wait for the Zagat survey on e-business sites.
Tagging for Katrina
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September 6th, 2005 by Alex
At the suggestion of Nancy White, I’ve just posted an introduction to tagging for people who are creating online resources for post-Katrina disaster recovery. It covers some suggestions for tag choice as well as overall tips on tagging. It’s online at You’re It.
Kudos to Fido
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September 6th, 2005 by Alex
Within a few days of my post, Fido responded with a 100% perfect solution:
The $50 GPRS Unlimited bundle was added to your account. It was possible to do so as we have not yet fully converted to our new Billing platform - thankfully.
The usual condition is that customers will be able to preserve a non-existent bundle or price plan under a grandfathered clause, which is now applicable to you.
So a big thank you to the kind folks at Fido for taking pity on a Treo owner, extra bonus points for a quick resolution, and triple bonus points for responding far more rapidly than I have in my own blog. My only excuse is that I’m on vacation, with limited Internet access…an excuse that should be deleted from my repertoire, now that I’ve got ubiquitous access on the Treo!