Passion-Centric Online Communities
November 19th, 2006 by Tom Williams
One of the most interesting aspects of my work right now is building out passion-centric communities around Autodesk products. The most exciting one is for 3d animators, and is called AREA. Tens of thousands of users have registered and hundreds have uploaded their own personal portfolios of their work for public display. It’s really satisfying to have created something that is being used by so many users to feature their work.
The following are my notes from a related talk I went to at the “Future of Web Applications Conference”, describing the emergence of this kind of website.
The State, Future & Business of Passion-Centric Online Communities
Ted Rheingold – founder of dogster/catster – ted@dogster.com – blogs: blog.dogster.com spideysenses.com
Complete presentation here: http://blog.dogster.com/2006/09/19/teds-talk-the-future-of-web-apps-conference/
Passion-centric online communities are spaces dedicated to a single particular interest they usually include human profile sharing, posting of passion-specific items and offer members opportunities to express their enthusiasm for something
Really all about amplifying passion
Core components
Other likely features
Sincerely cannot be faked
dogster - home page is a mess, but people cannot help but click on things
catster, different community so needed different cat colors and theme
people’s pages are like their lockers in high schools, they put up all kinds of crazy stuff on their own pages
Business — not too many revenue options
How to make advertising work
- keep your ad sales inside, no one will be able to convey your passion better than yourself
- (Cost per thousand) CPM is almost dead, for an advertisers message to be heard in the site voice and in placees where memeberrs are receptive to messaging
- require advertisers to offer something real to the community, something that requires them to participate and become trusted
Circle of Trust: Dogster –> Community –> Advertisers
Advertisers need to work with dogster to offer something of benefit to the community. Does the community understand and appreciate the offer? if not, then don’t keep it
Generalized Thoughts:
For every passion there will be a dedicated ’ster’ and theire can easily be more than one popular one per passion
- there will be tens of thousands of passion-centric online communities in 5 years
- Public APIs, badges and mini-site widgets will bring communities to where the member already is
- Public/open ID systems will be used
- the web is just the launching point, think cell phones, MMS, PDA’s, console-gaming, hand-held games, DVRs, car-based - communities will meet where their members are
A look at some really cool ones:
deviantART
amateur illustrator – based in CNet – featured members, lots of passion, lot of community PopSugar – great community based around a news and content site model mayhem –really well-defined etiquette necessary for this content MLG - major-league gaming – averaging hour-long visitor sessions; don’t even try to monetize website Yahoo Autos Custom –Very successful, hardly supported, and so compare to some other attempts: Carspace - created and supported by boompa - unfortunately white background, really all about what car lovers want, doing much better than the faniq – feelingbullish.com - one of the few communities that is actually working based on a reputation system without, lots of people have had trouble with reputation systems being gamed, (my note: here there’s an external realtioy that drives the reputation value) My bloglog – what’s really interesting is that most all the information comes from two lines of javascript in my blog to present a badge. you don’t have to make the community if you can tap into one famster – sharing families online - first priority has to be protection - Ted expects to see TONS of family sites clubmom – getting more traction now, but lots of partners, doing well on advertising minti - a baby site - like that they make their home page the latest activity teachade - for teachers crafster.org - crafts and craft advertising vampirefreaks.com - goth enthusiast site - 600,000 members, 4 million forum posts, band listing, really get into theme - don’t do groups, they do ‘cults’ - on another similar site instead of a “shopping cart” was a ‘”coffin” yourclimbing.com - done with drupal, nice to have a face on the home page yourmtb.com – “enthusiast-in-chief”right there on the home page cute overload –just using blogging software - "commenting is community" - every day An example of "digital doritos" - addictive stuff - "this is great, this is better than working" : stuffonmycat.com, cats in sinks, kittenwar, catsthatlooklikehitler.com twitter.com - cell-phone based communities coming up, where people post via text messages and photos into blog entries BANC - bay area nerd core - created as kind of a tag and nowinstant community that spans across sites and techniques:
featuring a different picture best use of ning, topic agnostic ning, caption
me tool allows you to label a photo
Applications for community usage are coming up around console-games
Every piece of software would really benefit from a community if it had the right rules and sharing features in the software
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