Blog Posts About: Social Design

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the impact of rating systems on communities. It was a focus in the Online Community Summit, with folks from Yahoo and the Omidyar Foundation discussing different versions of reputation and ratings. Have you ever thought about reputations linked to accurate tagging? Something for later…

Our trip site The World Is Not Flat has a basic rating system and I spent some time trying to figure out the best way to do it for our purposes. The ratings are for the Travel Experiences members contribute to the site (not the members themselves). Example with Ratings.

It’s a 5 star system, and I got to choose what each set of stars "means". This was an interesting exercise for me as it made me think about how the ratings might reinforce the things we value as owners of the site.

Case in point: We value almost all contributions- so we have no negative ratings. Our star ratings go like this:

1 = Nothing New
2 = OK
3 = Nice
4 = Interesting
5 = Awesome!

An alternative is to have a ratings scale that includes some negative attributes, such as:

1 = This Sucks!
2 = Bad
3 = Good
4 = Great
5 = Excellent!

This kind of rating system would work best in higher volume communities in which ratings work to enforce proper behavior. Negative ratings essentially work to punish members for not behaving in an acceptable manner. In some cases like eBay, the presence of negative feedback is the glue that holds the community together. This is especially true when the ratings become attached to personal identity, becoming reputation.

For us, it was all about reinforcing positive behavior and that meant thinking about what we want from the Member Travel Experiences and making those part of the ratings. In the end, we want the Member Experiences to be “Awesomely Interesting�? so that’s why those are the two highest ratings.

Below are some general observations about the state of online communities, according to the summit participants I've talked to and seen present:

Online Communities work. When I first came to this conference in 2003, it was on the heels of the dot-com bust and people were questioning the future of online communities. In 2004, the attitude was much more hopeful, social networking and blogs were adding a lot of interesting facets to the online community world. Here in 2005, the acceptance, value and success of online communities is a foregone conclusion. The question is not about “if�?, but how. It is great to see, for someone in my line of work.

Blogs are everywhere. I have not seen a demo or talked to a single person that has not already included, or about to include blogs in their online community strategy. Like the March of Dimes, it’s all about giving people a resource that they can control.

A focus is serving kids. More than ever before, people are interested in and concerned about serving the younger populations. There is a particular emphasis in how to serve the under 13 kids who are protected under COPPA. From what I heard yesterday, it's hard to have a community of kids without legal liability.

Message boards are old news. Unlike the last couple of years, the discussion is finally moving past message boards as the tool du jour. It’s now all about things like geo-tagging, massively multiplayer online gaming, stealth learning, virtual worlds, blogs, wikis, mobile etc. This is a very welcome new focus.

Community is a business strategy. It appears that people are a bit less concerned with ROI and more seeing community as a necessary part of doing business. It’s not even so much about monetizing, but community as a way of doing business. It is becoming more of a strategy and less of product, which is also good to hear.

[Updated] I almost forgot- a big point here. Power to the people. There are a lot of interesting things happening that involve community leaders giving more power to the members to manage the site. This isn't explicit power, but an aggregation of member actions that happen every day that are re-purposed to moderate discussions, define the best content, root out spam and flamers, etc. The costly and time consuming management of big communties is finding value in trusting the members to decide how the site is managed, based on tiny "votes" by members.

OK, back to paying better attention…

As of this morning, I’m at the Online Community Summit in Sonoma California. This is the 3rd summit I’ve attended and always look forward to it. There are a super-diverse group of people here that are all fascinated by online communities.

I just presented the March of Dimes Share Community with Patty Goldman from the March of Dimes. This was the first time I've met Patty face-to-face after working with her for over a year.

The presentation was a good chance to talk to people about the opportunities to have blogs and message boards in the same environment, which seems to be a popular topic these days.

Here’s a photo from my perspective right before the presentation:

The message so far: “The bubble is baaaack�?.

This is it, the rollout of the website that will be our home more than anyplace else as we travel the world in 2006.

The name of the site is “The World Is Not Flat�?, which easily translates to the acronym T.W.I.N.F. We call it “Twin-eff.�?

You can use the primary url: theworldisnotflat.com or the acronym version: twinf.com.

The Back-story:

When we started telling people about our plans for the trip, we found that people love to share their travel experiences. We would write what we could on a napkin or envelope and eventually lose those valuable tidbits.

So, we figured there must be a way to collect and organize similar travel experiences using a web site. We started looking for ways to have a travel blog that also enabled our friends to share their experiences with us on the Web. This was the original inspiration for TwinF.

Fun and Useful Info:

There are a few things on TwinF that you (likely being somewhat geeky) might find interesting.

• We've integrated Google Maps into the site. Our Dispatches from the road appear on the global map and in individual dispatch pages. These won't be nearly as cool until after we leave, but you get the idea...
• We have a star-based rating system for Travel Experiences that members contribute.

• Two different
  Tag clouds offer a way to navigate the site two main parts of the site.
• There are two primary RSS feeds:

  Our Dispatches: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TwinfDispatches
  Member Experiences: http://feeds.feedburner.com/TwinfExperiences

• TwinF is built on Drupal, hosted (and custom coded) by Bryght, designed by Rain City Studios. Of course, the concept and Social Design are all Common Craft. I could not ask for better people to be involved.

We're Counting on You:

The site is an experiment. We’re hoping that people who have traveled internationally will register and share their experiences. For this to work, we need to generate some word-of-mouth buzz. Please link to this post and/or the TwinF site. Use the tag “twinf�? if you’re so inclined. Pass it on!

About The Name:

There is an obvious resemblance to Tom Friedman’s excellent book The World is Flat. Our site has nothing to do with the book and is certainly not meant to be contrarian. We reserved the URL on December 24th, 2004, and his book was published on April 5th, 2005...if you're curious.

And Finally: Some Expectation Setting

We don't really know where all this is heading, but here's what we'd like to happen. We want to hear from you in comments and via Travel Experiences because we think it will improve our experience. In exchange we'll be very honest with you about our preparation and lives on the road. If you're curious, ask us!

Once we hit the road in December, our priority will be the traveling experience. We want to have a good trip more than a good website and that will be our guide. Until then, I'll be talking more about TwinF here on Common Craft.

Tags: twinf

Nancy White, Alan Levine and others are having an interesting discussion about the us vs. them attitude between users of blogs and message boards. Alan’s post Conversations: Tree People and Cave Dwellers offers food for thought via the attitudes shared by users of Moodle. They make Alan wonder if we’re all using the same Internet.

My perspective is that the relatively short life of blogs is at the root of the “Us vs. Them�? attitude. The idea that an individual can use a personal web site to connect and interact on a level equal to that of a discussion forum is still fresh and a little heretical in some circles.

When we hear criticisms of a blog as a viable communication/community platform, we’re hearing a lack of understanding thanks to the young life of the blog as compared to other platforms. Remember, cars used to be called “horseless carriages�?.

So, let the critics have their say. We bloggers are the early adopters of something different, but not necessarily better than other platforms for communicating on the web. I think we’ll find that blogging will fill a niche that is altogether different than the niche currently being filled by discussions forums and both will exists for a long time to come. The world on online communities is not either/or, it's neither, both or whatever combination works for a specific group.

In building new community sites, I think a lot about the new member registration experience. It is one of the only parts of the site that *every* new member experiences and making it friendly and effective gets things started on the right foot for you and the member. Here are some factors to consider, based on my experiences:

Usernames and Passwords:
The first thing a new member should do is create their own username and password. Don’t give them a random password and then make them hunt for how to change it. Make changing or creating a password part of the process. Once created, send them an email with their login info. This will save you support time later.

Required Info:
Some information must be collected for the site to run effectively. This usually includes a username, password and valid email address. Make the required fields crystal clear and don’t require too much information. People sometimes rebel against requirements and will fill your database with crap.

Optional Info:
Take a page from social networking and ask for optional information that may enable you, at some point in the future, to help members find one another. An example (among many) is zip code. By collecting zip codes, you have the raw materials you’ll need for hooking into a geo-location system or the ability to run statistical analysis on the membership. If you don’t *ask* now, you won’t be able to *act* later.

Make sure that all the registration info is editable by the user at a later date.

Verify email addresses:
You likely want to have valid email addresses in your database. The standard way of ensuring that emails are valid is to send the member an email based on the one they entered during registration and force them to click a link in that email. False email addresses will never be clicked on, so the registering member can be prevented from becoming a member (or have limited functionality). This can help prevent spammers and bots from entering the site.

Terms of Service Agreement:
No one reads them but lawyers and they may not help in court, but to be on the safe side, you should have an agreement and some way of ensuring that the member acknowledged it.

Get Them Started:
At the end of the process, point them to resources where they can get started. What often works is an "introduce yourself" topic. Other things could be the posting guidelines, announcements/news, etc.

Circle Back Often:
It’s easy to have a registration system in place and just let it run. However, you’d be surprised how quickly things can get out of date. Take the time to register as a new member every few months and look out for inconsistencies. What you called “Preferences�? before might now be called “My Settings�?, but never got updated.

Finally:
Remember, the registration system is often the first interaction a member has with the site. You never get a second chance to make a first impression- think it through.