Fresh Clickables is a blog where we post our newest web experiments, stuff about our clients, and stories from our office.
Building and Running an Online Community
I presented this week at Web Content 2010 in Chicago. My presentation was about the practical issues you face when building online communities.
I have been building and working with web communities for a long time. For this talk, which was to an audience primarily consisting of content strategists and web editors, I wanted to distill as many of the lessons I've learned into a few solid pointers they could actually apply to their work.
Based on the things that people tweeted during my session, these are the big ideas worth repeating:
- If you have an audience for your content, you already have a community. They may not be posting on your site yet, but they're out there, talking to one another.
- "User generated content" is something a drug addicted robot poops! Think of the stuff that your audience creates as "member created art."
- Community isn't made up of software components - it's made up of people, and they really want to talk to one another.
- You should start simple, and build community software to enhance what your community is already doing.
You can pretend you were at my presentation in Chicago by stepping through my slides, embedded below - worth it if only for the amazing user loyalty graph Heather and Jon shared with me from Dooce.com.
Helsinki Design Lab in the press
The local press in Helsinki, Finland have taken notice of Bryan Boyer and the launch of Helsinki Design Lab.
From We Are Helsinki:
Designer-architect BRYAN BOYER, originally from California but now settled into Helsinki, is puzzled by the misuse of terminology. "Strategy often gets mixed up with planning. To be strategic, you have to also make difficult decisions and produce results," ponders the Harvard graduate, who has been working on Sitra's Helsinki Design Lab project since the fall of 2008.
Read the rest here.
Helsinki Design Lab Launches
It's been a busy time here at XOXCO. I am very happy to announce our second launch of the month, Helsinki Design Lab. It was our first time working with an organization on another continent, but HDL's Bryan Boyer and his nightowl tendencies made it easy for us.
HDL's mission, in part, is as follows:
We assist decision-makers to view challenges from a big-picture perspective, and provide guidance toward more complete solutions that consider all aspects of a problem. Our mission is to advance this way of working - we call it strategic design.
HDL is collecting case studies of strategic design projects to be featured on the site and at their conference later this year. Applications for inclusion to HDL are accepted through the site.
We wanted the website to do justice to the beauty of HDL's identity and collateral, so we partnered with Andy Pressman at Rumors Studio, who did an excellent job of creating the website's design.
We're especially proud of bringing to life the special features around the site:
- Subtle animation effects in the case study and around the site highlight portions of the content.
- Case studies "come to life" as they are created using the submission tool thanks to tons of fancy CSS and jQuery magic.
- Each time the page is loaded a randomized version of the logo appears!
- "Exquisite" PDFs are generated through a custom javascript-based pagination function.
- Behind the scenes, all of the editorial tools feature autosave!
Of course, PeoplePods is providing the community components necessary for running the intense multi-user creative and editorial process Bryan and his internationally distributed team use to craft the case studies they feature. Thanks to Bryan, Andy and their teams for their hard work on this!
MediaBugs.org Launches
Today we helped launch MediaBugs.org, a website that aims to 'fix the news.' When Scott Rosenberg approached us for this project, his goal was to create a space where the average newspaper reader could submit a "bug" - or an error in reporting - that they'd spotted in their local paper. With the local news organizations participating, a conversation between the audience and the journalist responsible could then resolve the issue.
We built the site using our own PeoplePods software. It was a perfect fit for the type of interaction between readers and news organizations that Scott envisioned. Mignon Khargie designed the logo and branding, which was carried into the look and feel of the site with the help of Courtney Patubo.
For the launch, Scott and Mark Follman are focusing on Bay Area media, but eventually their plan is to expand nation-wide.
Scott Rosenberg introduces Mediabugs.org at Ignite
We'll be launching in just a few days, but if you'd like a preview of our latest project, check out the video below.
Weeknote 79
For New Years, Katie sent out little gift packages to our recent clients and co-conspirators. Katie wanted to make sure that we didn't just send people junk - nobody needs another American Apparel teeshirt with a dotcom logo on it. Inside each package was a Pantone 232C flash drive with the XOXCO logo LASER ETCHED onto it, and a custom postcard from Moo. They arrived last week, and Amit from Photojojo and Micki from NeighborGoods documented the contents on Flickr:
Last week, we had lunch with Todd Nienkerk from Four Kitchens, another local design and development company that does work simliar to the stuff we do. Over fancy sausages at Frank, we grilled Todd about how he runs Four Kitchens and about his experience hiring people. He gave us a ton of great advice and introduced us to a few people here in Austin who can help us as we continue to grow.
As we left our meeting with Todd, Katie and I decided that we should try to have a meeting with someone outside of our normal laptop-o-sphere at least once a week. We need to keep the external input coming in so we can learn from the smart people around us. I want to stay humble and remind myself that there is always more to learn.
Somehow, we continue to trick Kristina Halvorson to give us advice as well. We had a chat with her yesterday about the early days at Brain Traffic, and how she sets goals for the growth of her agency. We are used to setting goals for projects and products, but the task of dreaming up and planning for the future of a company like ours is a bit of a mystery to me.
But the advice we've been getting from everyone is inspiring - and made me realize that I tend to over think some of these issues. Todd warned us about the bureaucratic requirements for hiring people in Texas, but he also told us that there's a good pool of talented people here in Austin who are hungry for good work. Kristina told us to stop worrying about numeric metrics and goals, and start figuring out what kind of life and environment XOXCO is supposed to create for us. It seems that our plans can be a lot squishier than I thought. Which is good, because I am a pretty squishy guy.
In terms of actual CODE WRITTEN, which is really how I measure the success or failure of a week, I am ON FIRE. We are getting ready to release new versions of NeighborGoods and dooce Community with a bunch of cool new features and updates. I am slaughtering Basecamp tasks on the MediaBugs and HDL projects - both of which should be wrapping up in the next month. With design and functionality at about 90% on both sites, we are just a tiny bit behind schedule. I am totally impressed with the work everyone has been doing on these projects.
We're travelling to San Francisco again at the end of this week, and we'll be there through Tuesday of next week. We're hoping to schedule a few face-to-face meetings with our VIPS - if you want to see us, email Katie!.
Weeknote 77
As Week 77 closes, we are hosting the one and only Matt Haughey in our offices. He is sitting behind me right now moderating spam users on Metafilter. I challenge you to find another person as experienced as Matt who still does the dirty work of running a community every day.
We were up to our eyeballs in design this week. We started the week evaluating the first round of MediaBugs designs that CourtneyP created, and we're ending the week with the very exciting second round of design that Rumors did for Helsinki Design Lab. Both of the sites are coming to life quickly, and it looks like we're on schedule for February and March launches.
Jesse Keyes, our frequent partner in crime, has been kicking out revision after revision to an all new, all awesome homepage for SMITH Mag's Six-word Memoirs. Larry Smith sent us his last little chunk of feedback today, so the new design will hopefully go into production some time next week.
On Tuesday and Wednesday, Katie and I put together a report on our session with Bryan Boyer last week. It was an intense few days featuring lots of whiteboarding and pages and pages of notes and drawings. We pulled it all together so Bryan has a clear record of the things we looked at, the decisions we made, and the next steps we all have to take towards finishing the HDL site and moving onto the next phase. I love creating these kind of documents - thoughts and processes made concrete! Here's a zoomed out version of the document we sent to Bryan on Wednesday:
One of my early 2010 goals is to spend some time redoing all of our XOXCO document templates. Some beautiful PDF files have crossed my desk recently, and it makes me jealous. This is just another item we need to add to the agenda of our upcoming (and as yet unscheduled) XOXCO retreat. I love reading about BERG's internal processes and the efforts they are making to define the culture of their studio to themselves and to the outside world, and THAT also makes me jealous. We are so busy being externally focused, we haven't spent enough time focusing internally, defining our own goals.
We can't wait much longer to tackle these internal issues. My goal is to set aside a day or two during January to sort ourselves out, and to give ourselves the full XOXCO experience that we normally reserve for our clients. I want to draw some stuff for myself!
Another thing I want to spend more time on is doing pure research. It occurred to me the other day that I very rarely get lost in a chain of Wikipedia articles anymore, or find myself having spent hours reading about a new technology or API. This week I had cause to learn all about (and implement) an oauth consumer, and it was really refreshing to learn something new. If only I had a clone.
Random Reruns: Netflix Edition
We've expanded our web tv channel surfing tool, Random Reruns to include movies from your Netflix Instant Watch Queue.
If you've got a Netflix account and use the Instant Watch feature, you should try it out! Instead of wasting time browsing through endless listings, let Random Reruns pick a movie for you!
Play here: Random Reruns: Netflix Edition
It looks like this:
One day, I'll find enough time to finish up the protoype I built that takes a feed of video URLs and turns them into a "lean back" experience, complete with interstitials and "Coming Up Next" teasers. Til then, you can still get random reruns from Hulu or random reruns of classic Star Trek.
Weeknote 75
Katie and I spent New Years last week in Marfa, Texas where we got to explore the Chinati Foundation's collection of modern art. For a town of about 2000 people where most of the restaurants are only run as a hobby, Marfa contains a lot of great art and architecture. Katie posted some photos on her photo blog and even more on her flickr site.
While in Marfa, we visited Prada Marfa. We drove from Marfa, 35 miles out into the desert. For the entire drive, a creepy border patrol blimp hovered motionless overhead. I was convinced we were looking at a UFO. The desert rolled on in all directions. And then, just when we started wondering if we were going to run out of gas, we arrived. And, there we were, in the middle of the desert, looking at a fake shoe store. And as the sun set over the mountains and cars whizzed by at 95 miles per hour, it felt like it was the greatest thing ever, like having played a part in our very own personalized absurdist road movie. The entire experience was very immersive and felt highly designed.
I noticed that along the side of the building, people had left a long line of business cards and notes, each one under a little rock sitting upon it so that it wouldn't blow away. Whether they were left as some sort of offering to the piece, or just as proof that someone had made the trip, the underlying purpose these cards played there in the middle of the desert was to open up a communication channel between distant strangers.
"Can you believe it?" they say.
"I did this too!" they say.
It reminded me of the internet.
Weeknote 73
It's the end of the year, so as we try to hit our deadlines and move projects forward before the holidays, I have the glamorous job of organizing all of the financial information to have it ready for taxes. OK, it's not really glamorous but it is oddly satisfying.
I held the fort down in Austin, and Ben flew to San Francisco. While there, he met with Micki from NeighborGoods, Scott and Mark from MediaBugs and Amit from Photojojo.
When he returned, we watched the video prototype for the potential future of magazines, Mag+ brought to us by BERG and Bonnier R&D. Sadly the prototype comes at us the same week that the