Designing Common Craft T-Shirts on Pixish.com

As you may have seen, the Common Craft Store has a section for merchandise that is looking pretty minimal at the moment.  At the same time, we often get requests for t-shirts.  Hopefully, we're about to solve this problem.

We've created a new "assignment" on a website called Pixish. Using Pixish, we can describe an image we need and have a community of creative people submit their ideas.  The creator of the winning images win "rewards" - often money, links, etc.  

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Speaking at Zaaz Event August 14th, Seattle

I'll be speaking at what is shaping up to be a fun event at Zaaz in downtown Seattle on August 14th. I'll be presenting a version of the Online Community as Party talk.  The event is free and focused on folks in the local UX / usability / IA / design community.  To RSVP, pleae leave a comment here. 

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Clue Unit Podcast #20: A Conversation with Derek Powazek

The Clue Unit podcast is a (mostly) weekly discussion of news and trends related to online communities in the business context with Jake McKee, Lee LeFever and Christopher Carfi.

This week we were joined by Derek Powazek, someone that we've talked about a number of times and took this chance to talk with him. We focused on Community As Business - Our current focus.

Clue Unit #20: A Conversation with Derek Powazek - June 25, 2007

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Online Community as Party

A while back I posted an entry called Your Community is a Party Waiting to Happen that outlined a number of common sense ways that hosting a party is like managing an online community. I really believe the metaphor is useful and I've developed a talk on the subject.

Here are the slides from the talk...

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Plenty of Fish and Dating Site Disruption

If you haven't heard about Markus Frind and his dating site at plentyoffish.com, you will.

Markus is singlehandedly disrupting the dating site industry by offering a free alternative to pay-to-play sites like match.com. What makes his story so interesting is that he is the site's only employee - he runs the whole site from his Vancouver, Canada apartment and makes millions of dollars from Google ad revenue.

Here are some of the basic facts from a recent Wall Street Journal story (via: online personal watch):

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Facebook, Addiction and the New News

Over the past 3 weeks or so, I've fallen for Facebook. It has continually impressed me with it's innovation, social design and growing dominance of its space. Facebook does a lot of things well, but the one thing that impresses me most is how it exposes the actions of my friends on the site. I can see it when Kris Krug joins a group or Duncan Rawlinson updates Twitter . It brings the online and public world of my friends closer to me.

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Online Community Planning - Getting the Party Started

One of the mantras of the Online Community Unconference became "keeping the party rolling" - not because we partied all day in night, but because many attendees were already in the community business, but looking for ways to improve the experience and value on an ongoing basis. Indeed, the group was a mix of the very experienced and those just getting started.

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Off to the Online Community Unconference

I'm heading down to the Silicon Valley for the Online Community Unconference put on by my friends at Forum One.  If you're unfamiliar with an unconference, check out this wikipedia entry.  Basically it's a great way to get people together without all the baggage (and costs) of a "conference."

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Clue Unit Podcast #14: Non-Traditional Transparency

The Clue Unit podcast is a (mostly) weekly discussion of news and trends related to online communities in the business context with Jake McKee, Lee LeFever and Christopher Carfi.

(click here to listen - MP3)

(click here to subscribe to this feed)

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Your Community is a Party Waiting to Happen

You can find the slides for this talk here.

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