Love your leaks
.29.8 | No Comments »
August 29th, 2007 by Alex
Traditional web design often focused on keeping people on a site by reducing the number of exit points: with few or no external links, the logic goes, people will stay longer.
It doesn't work that way. The Internet is designed for hyperlinks, lateral exploration, serendipitous discovery. When you cut off exit routes, you're cutting off your site's circulation, and you're creating a stagnant site.
And people don't like to visit sites that feel cut-off from the rest of the Net. Just think of how annoying it is when you get trapped in one of those spam sites with the endless pop-ups: window after window opening until you think you'll never escape. It doesn't make you want to visit that site again, does it?
Healthy circulation -- in and out -- is even more important in a user-driven community. The experience of porousness, of connectedness to the larger Internet, is crucial to user engagement and participation. Think of some of the most popular Web 2.0 communities: Technorati, del.icio.us, digg, even Facebook: all of them build engagement through porousness, through pulling in the best of the larger web and letting users tag, remix and search it.
What comes in must go out, of course. All of that bookmarked, tagged, aggregated and shared content points to external web sites: people come in and out of these sites all day long.
And that principle of porousness doesn't just apply to sites that are deliberately set up as content archives. Any online community can benefit by embracing porousness: by highlighting, aggregating, republishing and remixing the best of the larger web.
Porousness can mean something as simple as adopting a tag for your site, and inviting people to tag their external blog posts with that tag so you can republish their posts. By making it easy for people to contribute to your site -- without requiring them to do their blogging on your own platform -- your site's content and freshness expands. You get a ton of inbound links from all those people blogging about you (hello, Google!) and you get lots of people reading about you on those external blogs.
What's in it for the bloggers? Traffic back to their own sites -- from the highlights you're republishing on your blog, linking back to their original posts. Yes, you're pointing YOUR visitors to THEIR external blogs -- but you're getting back many times the energy and interest from all these folks now blogging about you.
The alternative is to build a big wall to keep all those visitors locked in your own site. But any wall that keeps people in keeps even more people out.
A beacon to find your life path
.7.8 | No Comments »
August 7th, 2007 by Alex
OK, I'm cheating a little here -- I already love my work a lot of the time. But recently I connected with someone who is helping our company bring its work into even closer alignment with our values and our goals.
Alanna Fero is a career consultant and personal coach who helps people figure out how they can bring their work into alignment with their values. She knows how to bring a values-aligned career or business to life -- to get from aspiration to vision to the nuts-and-bolts of how to get yourself from here to there.
And now she's launching a book that will make her approach accessible to a wider audience. Love Made Visible will be released on August 15. Launch details below:
LOVE MADE VISIBLE RELEASE PARTY
5:30 – 7:30pm August 15th
The Royal Vancouver Yacht Club
3811 Point Grey Road Vancouver BC (at Highbury, just west of Alma)
Book Signing, Light Refreshments & Great Networking
Please RSVP by August 12 to launch@alannafero.com
Searching sustainably at happyfrog
.4.8 | No Comments »
August 4th, 2007 by Alex
There's a great big gorgeous frog in the centrefold of the latest issue of SharedVISION now hitting Vancouver's streets, along with the URL happyfrog.ca... so I guess the frog is out of the bag, and it's safe to tell you about our latest project.
happyfrog is a directory of thousands of Vancouver-area businesses and organizations working in sustainability and wellness. But it's also built with community in mind. Users can rate and review the businesses they've patronized; anyone listed in happyfrog can open a conversation with the community via built-in blogging.
It's still in beta mode (as the site puts it, this is the tadpole edition), so we'll be listening closely to what community members tell us is and isn't working – and what could make it even better.
happyfrog is the brainchild/labour-of-love of Ron Williams. Ron's been a dream to work with: a passionate, practical visionary eager to make a positive difference in the world. His long-time association with wellness and sustainability publishing generally and SharedVISION in particular has been invaluable in steering happyfrog to its launch. And we're looking forward to working with him to see just how far this frog can jump.