Beyond Message Boards - Ideas for the New Communities

It wasn't too long ago that online communities had a killer app - it was the message board. It was the Honeymooners of early television. When choice was limited, popularity grew around the best options of the time. Indeed, the friendly message board has been a bedrock of online community interaction - one of the original articles. These days however, the message board has competition in the effort for your community's attention.

Is it a Tag Cloud? Weighted List? Zeitgeist?

We've seen them on Del.icio.us, Technorati, Flickr, 43 Things, Upcoming.org, Amazon and even personal blogs (scroll), but I'm hearing all sorts of different names. You know what I'm talking about- right? The groupings of words with the size of the text indicating the popularity or frequency of the word.

Eating Their Dog Food

That phrase always makes me laugh, but I think it's accurate. If you're not familiar, it means that a company that produces a product should use the product themselves.

In the online community world, I've been suspicious of companies that purport to understand all things "community" but don't have a community that supports their customers using their platform. It's one of the things I do like about Web Crossing, they have WebXHarbor.

I haven't seen a more productive example of eating their dogfood than how the Robot Co-op is using with their new site at ideas.43things.com.

Amazon's "Concordance" Zeitgeist

You likely know that Amazon is working to scan every page of every book right? It's what enables the "Look inside the book" feature- they scan every page.

They are now turning that into something they call Concordance, which is the "zeitgeist" view of the most used words in the book. See it in action here.

Thanks for the tip Jay!

Boeing's Blog- Now More "Real"

A while back I linked to a "blog" by Boeing VP Randy Beseler. The blog world gave them a lot of hell because it wasn't a "real blog". That point is debatable in my eyes and I thought it was a move in the right direction, at least.

What Randy's blog lacked was the ability to become a part of what I hear people call "the conversation". It lacked a few features that enable him to really participate in the blog world.