Archive for the “Online Communities & Discussion” Category

This change has had me wrenching for months, but I’m finally going to do it.  I am transitioning my web programming business into a media business.

The rationale for me doing this is really mostly personal, but I’ve discovered over time three things:

1. Web programming, as delightful as it is when it’s just the design and programming work, is a horrible business for a small outfit like mine to engage in for myriad reasons.  One of the biggest horrors I have is simply being able to keep up with all the different ways to develop a website and the technologies, and that’s just within the PHP/JavaScript universe.  Also, I have come to the hard conclusion that it’s become too prohibitively difficult to find the paid projects I can handle from very difficult-to-identify customer sets.  Marketing and handling inquiries has become pretty much become an impossible chore for this line of work.  And I detest impossible chores — they deplete my passion.
2. Because of #1, revenues have been way too uneven, and this has dissatisfied me to no end.  I need to have income that is more regular.  I’m sure everyone can sympathize here.
3. Developing my main media site, Louisville History & Issues, has become an increasing labor of love to the point of addiction, and I also have another media project in development that has me increasingly excited, if not riveted.  Strangely enough, the first web project I ever tinkered with in the mid 1990s was a media site, an e-zine to be exact.  So this is my first love, and I would like to make a go of it as the WebCommons business.

So, as of now, WebCommons :: Web Programming Services becomes WebCommons :: Media.

Since I am spending most of my time working on developing the media sites, this company site will be changed slowly.  I haven’t even decided on my new company logo yet. 

Further, I fully intend to take care of existing web programming customers, and perhaps even take on media-related projects that you may have (e.g., blog/sites).

The biggest thing spurring this change is my deep desire to concentrate on building a media business, and this includes running Louisville History & Issues as a commercial public service (kind of like a newspaper) for the first time — up to now, it has been run as a fully non-profit service.

As for the specific changes to Louisville History & Issues, I will post more about that over there soon.

Big thanks (!) to everyone, including my customers, for bearing with me as I make these changes.

Check out the results at this topic on Louisville History & Issues.

Seeing what visitors actually do on a discussion board not only triggers brainstorms for positive functional changes and a significant re-orientation of what content is developed.

Analytics are also letting me know, brutally, of the limitations of the discussion board approach to creating a thriving online “community”.

How does one really go about creating an “open discussion zone” that keeps people sticking around, and better yet, participating?

ReadWriteWeb recently has been talking up the new role of community managers in companies, especially start-ups, here lately.   See their posts “Do Startup Companies Need Community Managers?” and “Community Manager Jobs Are Hot”.

The term community manager has traditionally had this definition, but that’s not what I’m talking about.   Well, hopefully, we don’t have any Ralph Furleys amongst us (Don Knotts was cool though!).  

Anyway, Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb has boiled the definition down to the following:

A community manager is someone who communicates with a company’s users/customers, development team and executives and other stake holders in order to clarify and amplify the work of all parties. They probably provide customer service, highlight best use-cases of a product, make first contact in some potential business partnerships and increase the public visibility of the company they work for.

I certainly think this is a great start, but I think it basically captures one side of the job, the part that everyone sees, and the part the person in the role projects, but doesn’t address the actual ongoing intricacy of making a job like this work to success.

The other side of the job is the shaping of the process of discussion itself.   This involves both a grasp of discussion dynamics as well as social media technologies/trends (where being a person with web programming knowledge is very helpful).

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One of WebCommons’ non-profit pet projects, the local discussion board Louisville History & Issues, is becoming increasingly prominent in Louisville political and history circles, but even more interesting for discussion here, it is also becoming a highly functional (master?)piece of web software.

Louisville History & Issues (LouHI for short) is based on WebCommons’ fork of phpBB version 2 that is currently dubbed “Citizen Assembly Board” (CAB for short).   CAB has been in development for several years, and has many interesting and unusual features, many not even available on the newest version 3 of phpBB.   Of course it also doesn’t enjoy some of the newest features and design approach of phpBB 3, but that has its own set of pros and cons, and I will likely muse about that in a future post here.

LouHI is currently undergoing a phased release of its “Version 3″, which I am touting as the “finally useful!” version.   Read about the changes in Phase 1 as well as plans for later phases after the jump.

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