Ben Brown:
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.
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 72
Katie and I went to New Orleans this week to attend Do it With Drupal, a great conference for lovers of the dark Drupal arts put on by our friend Jeff Robbins and his cohorts at Lullabot. I have been wearing one of their teeshirts for years, so it was quite an experience to walk through a hotel convention center and see hundreds of people wearing the same shirt.
Jon Armstrong and I gave our talk about online communities. It went well, and I had a lot of interesting follow up discussions with other attendees. dooce Community makes such a compelling case for the kind of personality filled niche communities I love to build. I really wanted to sell the rewards these kind of sites deliver, so we talked both about the traffic boost they've seen - Jon showed snapshots of his analytics that show the community users spend nearly three times as long on the site as they do on the main blog - and about the emotional outpouring they've seen from the nearly 20,000 members they've signed up in the first month. See this thread, it melts my heart.
I said a few things that people liked and tweetered about a bit. I am always mega-honored when anyone quotes a talk I give on Twitter. This time around it was "When I build a community, I'm hoping it will actually improve people's offline lives as well as online," and When you open up community access to a site you own, you're essentially selling shares in your site."
These choice nuggets are from a section of the presentation where I was discussing the responsibilities we have as purveyors of web services and online communities. The tools we have to measure our impact on the people who use our products focus on anonymized trends and aggregated cross-sections. But the communities we manage are not these aggregates! Each member is a person, sitting somewhere in front of a laptop or holding an iPhone. Each, a person who has made the decision to trust us, that we as software providers are trying to make the world a better place through technology, by connecting them and letting them speak to one another. I believe that the software we provide creates a connection between us and each one of these people, and that we need to respect that connection. So I rant about it!
While at DIWD, we got to hang out with some charming new friends. Kristina Halvorson gave a great keynote about content strategy, and then gave me some great advice about running a small business. NOTHING BUT CLASS, that lady.
We also spent some quality time with Rob Purdie, who presented about his work with The Economist and all of the magic that can be achieved using the Scrum development method. I impolitely complimented his politeness about three times, so I hope he won't avoid me the next time we're in the same city.
Our lovely client, Micki Krimmel was in town as well, presenting about the job of community manager. She gave a great presentation, and it was exciting to see NeighborGoods up on the big screen. If any DIWD attendees are reading, join up to share your old Drupal books with your pals.
In between all of the excitement, I found just enough time to upload the first baby version of Media Bugs to our dev server. After weeks of planning, it's always fun to see the software come to life. Scott has already logged in and posted the first few bugs. Meanwhile, the team at Rumors Studio nailed their deadline and delivered some awesome wireframes for our join project with Helsinki Design Lab.
The only thing I haven't checked off my todo list is to check out the newest version of Flixel. Adam Atomic has been twittering about all the improvements he's made, and I'm anxious to dig in and see what the new capabilities inspire.
I'm off to San Francisco on Monday for a few days of in-person time with our friends in PST. Katie will be holding down the fort in Austin while we prepare to close out the year. Excelsior!
Weeknote 71
I spent far too much time this week thinking about and discussing with people what week we would start our weeknotes with. Should we start counting from the day I left Consumating.com and went back to being an independent developer? Or maybe we should go all the way back to 2003 when I first embarked on this style of business? Or even further back, to when I quit my last "real" job to start Deepleap in January of 2000? In the end, we decided to count from the date we incorporated as XOXCO, Inc. Then I used the Wolfram Alpha search plugin I made a few months ago, and voila: Week 71.
When we begin a big project with a new client, the first part of our design process is to write a detailed software specification. These are gigantic documents that describe each and every page type on the site, and each and every function that will be present on each page type. We create these documents so that everyone involved in the project has a crystal clear idea of what we're going to be building throughout following rounds of design - where we define the actual structure of the pages, and eventually the visual and user experience elements. Then, once the site is built, we use these documents as the basis for our quality assurance process. Are all these elements present? Do they function as described?
This week, two specification documents like this were approved by their respective clients. Getting these approved feels like the website's actual birthday: now we know what it will grow up to be. All that's left is the hundreds of hours of design, coding and testing to come!
Meanwhile, I was able to finish up the changes to PeoplePods I made while in my turkey-induced coma last week and release them as PeoplePods version 0.7. This new version goes a long way in simplifying the interfaces to creating, querying and displaying content. As part of this release, I've also posted a quick start guide for developers who do not want to read the full 20,000 words of documentation before getting to the nitty gritty of actually making kickass software.
Along the way, I had the opportunity to pitch PeoplePods to a few folks, and I noted down a few bullet points that I need to add to our sales pitch to other developers. Among them were:
PeoplePods is a great upgrade path for people who have reached the limit of what Wordpress can do. Instead of trying to trick your blogging software into being a social application with dozens of third party plugins, use software freshly designed for creating social applications!
Even though PeoplePods is free and open source, it is being maintained and supported by XOXCO, so we can keep tight control over the software and everything that comes with it. There are only 2 fingers in this pie, and they both belong to me.
We here at XOXCO believe that the future of online community revolves around smaller sites, member organized groups, and functionality that emphasizes the local and personalized content. PeoplePods was created to provide exactly these features, with built in support for member groups. You can see one way groups can be used on NeighborGoods.
Next week, we're off to New Orleans for Do it with Drupal, where I will be presenting alongside Jon Armstrong about creating online community. I may also try to organize a rebellion AGAINST Drupal... If you're going, come say hi!
Help Define The Future Of Errors In Journalism
Scott Rosenberg, who we are working with on MediaBugs, has just posted an interesting challenge: how do we categorize all of the different types of errors a journalist could make while reporting a story so that people can file bugs about them?
There's already a lively discussion going on in the comment thread of Scott's post on the MediaShift Idea Lab blog, so head over there to share your thoughts.
Just Launched: dooce Community
We're excited to announce today that our latest project, dooce Community has launched! We've been working closely with Heather and Jon on this new branch of the mega popular dooce empire, and we're very proud of the results.
The new site will allow members of the dooce community to get to know each other in a way their semi-anonymous commenting system never did. The site is a question/answer site ala Yahoo Answers, but members will be welcome to discuss whatever they like - from babies to cameras to politics.
Like the main dooce blog, the community is powered by Drupal. XOXCO built a bunch of new social gadgets for this site, and if you'd like to learn more about how we did it, come see Jon and I give our talk all about the site at this year's Do It With Drupal conference.
Many thanks to Jon and Heather, Ben Durbin, the support staff at LiquidWeb, and our friends at Lullabot whose help with Drupal's idiosyncrasies was invaluable.
NeighborGoods Launches in LA
According to TechCrunch and GigaOm, NeighborGoods has officially launched in Los Angeles! They've got lots of nice things to say about our work, and we're super proud to have worked with Micki to get this far!
NeighborGoods is built on top of PeoplePods, XOXCO's new social software toolkit. Using PeoplePods means we were able to skip all of the infrastructure building, and instead spend all of our time in product design and ideation. Throughout our alpha release, and now moving into our beta release, we've been able to quickly and easily add functionality to the site simply by creating new "pods" of content and functionality.
PeoplePods will be released under an open source license within the next few weeks! Follow PeoplePods on Twitter for the latest information.
GO CLIENTS GO!
Our work with Total Immersion on the Go Hamster Go! Facebook application has been named the #1 augmented reality application by Revolution Maggazine because it represents "a fantastic example of how the technology is being integrated within the media environment." If you haven't suction-cupped a few hamsters to your face yet, we highly recommend it.
Meanwhile, NeighborGoods is rapidly approaching a public beta, and they've launched a cool partnership with Los Angeles Metblogs. Readers of LA Meblogs can join the site and immediately be introduced to othe readers of the blog using the cool new group invite system that we built. If you live in LA, check it out now so you can tell your friends you were a member before the site went public.
New features at SMITHTeens.com
To coincide with the Sept 1 launch of SMITH Magazine's newest book, I Can't Keep My Own Secrets: Six-Word Memoirs by Teens Famous & Obscure, XOXCO designed and built several new community features for the SMITHTeens site. We launched a brand new forum for the talkative teen memoirists, improved profiles, a smoother user experience for posting memoirs and comments, and an activity tracker that, for the first time in the site's history, gives it's members a way to see who is talking about their memoirs.
In the weeks ahead, we'll be expanding some of these features to include even more ways for the teens to connect with their friends and collaborate on creative projects. And, we'll be bringing some of this magic to the main SMITH site so that adult memoirists can also benefit!
XOXCO's Busy Summer
We have been having an extra busy summer here at XOXCO. Check out some of the nifty stuff we've launched in the last few weeks:
We worked with Total Immersion to create the Go Hamster Go! game to promote the KIA Soul. The game uses augmented reality head tracking software so that you can control the game with your face. We built the Facebook application portion of the game.
NeighborGoods, a platform for community-based lending and renting, has just gone into alpha! Our project with Micki Krimmel, NeighborGoods hopes to make it easier for you to save money by borrowing stuff from your friends instead of buying new stuff. NeighborGoods is built on our PeoplePods framework, and we worked with designer Mari Sheibley to implement Micki's vision.
Speaking of PeoplePods, we've been working with designer Mark Bult to get PeoplePods launched. As soon as we're doing building the new site, the community building framework will (finally) be available to developers.
Finally, we launched a new blog a few weeks ago called Must Share Hair - a place for real people with real hair to share their hair awesomeness with the world. The submissions of great hair have been pouring in, and The Wall Street Journal covered our launch. The blog has already clawed its way up the Tumblr popularity scale, where we are currently the third most popular blog about hair.
Coming Soon: Neighborgoods
XOXCO has been working with Micki Krimmel over the past few months on a really cool project, and we are now getting tantilizingly close to letting you play with it.
NeighborGoods is a tool that will make it easier for you to share your stuff with your friends and neighbors, and to save money by borrowing or renting stuff that you'd otherwise have to buy and then store in your closet. We can't wait to loan you our awesome (but hard to store) collapsible 16-foot ladder!
Sign up to be one of the first people to use Neighborgoods, and follow us on Twitter for tantalizing tidbits of info that Micki will be releasing over the next few months.
Just Launched: Six-Word Memoirs for AARP
We just helped our pals at SMITH Magazine to launch a new branch of their ever expanding network of personal storytelling sites. The newest addition is a print and online collaboration between SMITH and AARP Magazine, collecting six-word memoirs from seniors about life, death, and most importantly, food.
We're always happy to work with the folks at SMITH. They were doing the wordcount thing way before Twitter made it hip.
Flixel
Oh great! Another super cool pixel programming framework just launched. There goes my weekend.
Flixel is a set of ActionScript classes that make creating games a lot easier. I just poked through the code for the sample game, and it looks brilliantly simple. I am very, very excited to play with this code.
Check out the code for doing collision detection between all the objects in your game! 4 lines!
//collisions with environment FlxBlock.collideArrays(_blocks,_bullets); FlxBlock.collideArrays(_blocks,_botBullets); FlxBlock.collideArrays(_blocks,_bots); FlxBlock.collideArray(_blocks,_player);
(Don't miss Gravity Hook and Fathom, also built using Flixel)
UPDATE: I spent some time hacking on the demo code and was able to create this: a version where you can draw the map with your mouse as you play. NEAT!
Staying Simple While Adding Features
Over Memorial Day weekend, I finally got a chance to work a little bit on the next version of do.Oh, our super simple todo list application. do.Oh quietly launched in 2006, and has been running virtually without update since then.
The tagline of do.Oh is "Now with fewer features." Our initial idea was to create a todo list that did not have the clutter of modern "task management systems" that cause you to spend more time managing tasks than actually doing things. No tags, no due dates, no calendaring, no categories, no sub-lists. You put something on your list, then you do it. That's it.
But there are a few key features we want to add! So the task has become designing an interface that allows these new (and awesome) features to live alongside the extremely simple list interface without distracting you from the tasks at hand.
Right now, we're experimenting with simple keyboard shortcuts that open up implicit information spaces that otherwise hide behind an ellipses or small button. The key is to leave the list interface mostly undisturbed until you absolutely need one of the more advanced features, at which point they appear magically before you.
Here's a screenshot of the prototype I built last night to test some ideas. The "advanced options" bubble appears around the selected task when you hit the Tab key on your keyboard. While the bubble is open, several other keyboard shortcuts become available.
Pixel Programming with Axonome
Michael Buffington has created a Javascript library for creating dynamic isometric pixel grids, complete with the ability to navigate an player avatar around the grid. My brain is currently exploding with ideas for using this in games and art and user interface design. It might even find its way into PixlPinchr.
WolframAlpha Search Plugin
When I saw WolframAlpha, I knew I was going to have a lot of questions I wanted to ask it. So I made a Firefox search plugin. It looks like this:
Hey Lifehackers! Check out the other things XOXCO makes like a way to get random reruns from Hulu or a Twitter bot that tracks the DJIA. And snag our feed to get Fresh Clickables in your inbox.