The Building of a Web Community, Part One
Shai Coggins has been writing about blog communities lately, and has tasked others to write posts on their own blogs about it. In my opinion, it’s a pretty tough subject to write clearly on. I’m going to try to bring in my perspective as one who not only blogs, but is in the midst of a community building project right now. This is part one, and I hope to follow up with more soon.
I used to believe that to become a community member, you have to participate and enter the discussion. I used to compare lurkers to people who window shop, checking out all the displays, but never making a purchase. This may have been true in Web 1.0 (ugh, did I just say that?). But with the social nature of the web, all of that is changing.
In the first month that Babblz has been live, we have had around 100 user signups, with about 20 users being the most active. But it’s community is much larger than that. For instance, we had one of our users submit a post to the site about Sanjaya Malakar titled “Sanjaya, Sanjaya, gone set this place on fiiiiah!.” It got some traffic early on from the search engines, but things really picked up as he became closer and closer to getting kicked off of American Idol. Chances are if they searched for “Sanjaya Gone”, they were being directed initially to Babblz, and then to the submitter’s site. While the traffic may not have directly led to Babblz signups, it did send traffic to our user’s blog, and maybe created a few new followers of her site. This is why social bookmarking sites are so popular. When you submit to these services, you are not just submitting a site. You are submitting a community.
Thursday, May 3rd, 2007
May 5th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, Steve! I love community projects (as you know! ;-)) and I particularly like the out-of-the-usual-web-mould stuff. And, I think what you’re trying to do with Babblz is good stuff. That’s why I hope that it goes well.
In fact, after you came up with Babblz, I even started thinking that Arts, Crafts and Design should have a similar Digg-like community too.
Anyway, looking forward to reading more about your thoughts on the subject too. And, finding out how Babblz will grow and evolve.
June 11th, 2007 at 2:37 am
Thanks for this great post, i am a newbie trying to start a blog community and thisd post helped me some
Greets
Klaas
July 22nd, 2007 at 9:27 am
I would be interested to hear how the site has progressed since you launched it. I am in the midst of launching a couple communities here real soon and it definitely is hard.
I have a blogging community that I am still programming, but have released the forum aspect of it for now to hopefully help build the community while I finish the rest of the site. I guess I’ll figure out if that was a good idea or not!
September 4th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
These tpye of current or buzz events tend to drive a lot of searches and hence a lot of traffic, so if you happened to have a post on Sanjaya at that moment of time then surely you should would see a lot of traffic as long as there’s not a more established or authoratative site doing the same.
November 13th, 2007 at 8:34 pm
This is a great post! Thank you for taking the time to write about this. Community projects can be quite successful. I had never heard of Babblz before so I will check it out. Keep posting great information and I will keep coming back!
February 20th, 2008 at 5:41 am
I’m new to the web, so it’s nice to find a site like this. Havent heard of babblz before ,but I’ll be sure to check it out soon.
March 7th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
I have not heard of Babblez until now, though I’m not new to the web. I spend most of my time one Myspace and some other places. But this one here is a nice post.
May 8th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
I am very interested in the concept of a community. You make a great point that I never really thought of. I compare everything in my niche market to www.threadless.com which is a community based t shirt site that is killing everybody in the industry. They set up contests for designers to submit their art work and the community votes on what they like and the winner gets money and the company prints the design and sells t shirts at an alarming rate. In thier case all of thier success is based on how strong of a community they have. Great post.