Posts from — April 2008

I’m putting together a reading list of articles geared towards building online communities - it’s for a co-worker who is going to be taking on more responsibility in this area. Any additions or suggestions would be appreciated.

Tips
Bokardo - Building Community isn’t about Features
Tips from Metafilter’s Creator
Making Light - Virtual Panel Discussion
Encouraging Participation
Disemvowelling
Building a Successful online Community - Creating Passionate Users

General interest
The Nearly Never Ending Market for Niche Social Networks
Boing Boing’s moderation policy
User Comments and the Art of Moderation
Design Observer - What’s in a name?
Howard Owens - the Modern Journalist’s Role in Guiding Conversations
Matthew Ingram - Community is the Hard Part
Pegasus News - Lessons from the Launch (OJR)
Bruce Clay - Panel on Building Community

Studies
http://www.iprospect.com/about/researchstudy_2007_socialnetworkingbehavior.htm
http://www.danah.org/papers/

Alexa has updated it ranking system. Good on them. By their own admission, who fares the best by all three yardsticks - compete, quantcast or alexa? Looks like quantcast is cleaning up.

Odd that alexa doesn’t seem to measure itself…

Alan  Mutter posted Tuesday about declining time-on-site (TOS) numbers for newspapers. Welcome to my least favorite web metric.
A few things are happening here, and they don’t just have to do with  Google, Digg and others eating our lunch.

For one, time on site can naturally to decrease as unique visitors increase - new audience should not be expected to devour content at the same pace and volume as core audience. We’ve noticed a shift downward in out TOS as our uniques have shot up significantly this year. I also expect the uniques growth to flatten in a bit, at which point our TOS should start to tick upwards. Expansion and digestion cycles are natural.

Second, time on site is not always a good thing. In the long run, it’s what we want. But given the sorry state of newspaper site design circa 2005, and the vast improvements underway at most major sites these days, a decline in TOS can also be seen as a sign of “people are finding things easier.” That’s not a bad thing, and it frees you up to grow more legitimate traffic with happier users.

Third - Newspapers, and most news sites, are actively engaging in activities that can reduce time on site, and our readers prefer it that way: RSS feeds, e-mail newsletters, facebook applications, embeddable objects, and other atomized technologies create more entry points, and potentially more drive-by eyeballs. The challenge will be to make money off of this atomized distribution, not to always lure people back to your website.

Finally, I would bet that TOS growth (or actual numbers) is declining at virtually every site out there with the exception of aggregators and social networks. This isn’t about the newspaper industry, it’s about content creators and aggregators. There is a growing tension between the index and the index cards.

I’d like to see a moratorium on empty calls for online innovation from the j-blogosphere… I think Clay Shirky can be forgiven for not being so involved in the journalism blog scene, but I lost a little of my idol worship for Mr Shirky when his recent Britannica Blog post ended up to be little more than that.

I’m not saying we shouldn’t be pointing to great new things, or leading discussion on possible solutions, but it’s pretty clear to anyone in the j-blog audience that things are bad and innovation is needed. So let’s focus on what’s interesting.

Here are are the stories you’ve already read:

1. Can QR codes help? I can’t imagine they can, but I’m willing to be wrong.
2. I saw this and loved it - not sure all audiences will. Give up the sanctity of articles and start thinking about posts.
3. The News Leadership blog needs to fix its RSS feed.
4. I have yet to devote any time to my FireEagle account but this post makes me think I should.
5. I’m liking the Telluride Watch website. Who’s responsible?
6. OpenAd tries to do an istockphoto to the Advertising Industry.

I’ve got a small tumbleblog going over at bits.midadopter.com, where I will eventually cross post my del.icio.us bookmarks and shared google reader items, in addition to more personal news and items that don’t quite fit here. The main Midadopter will focus largely on my personal and professional interest in the evolving dissemination of news and information. Not much there yet, as here… I’m trying to segment my posts a bit and keep this space open for what I want it to be.

I’ve had a lot of half-formed thoughts about the newspaper industry lately, and as usual someone else has stated them more eloquently.