Design for Community [Kindle Edition]

This book is not a technology book on the intricacies of blogger or Manila. The focus is on the design and moderation issues that arise when you add community features to your site. You'll learn what works and what doesn't when building and running virtual communities on the Web.

The author should know. Derek Powazek, a journalist by training, has helped build many pioneering virtual communities for HotWired, Electric Minds, Vivid Studios, Netscape, and his own fray.com and kvetch.com (love that site). He writes with wit and wisdom on what works on the Web when creating and running thriving online communities.

Each chapter focuses on a specific issue of community building on the Web, from moderation to intimacy to using email. Each chapter ends with New Riders' signature interview with an expert in that particular area. They include:

Matt Haughey (metafilter.com), Steven Johnson (plastic.com), Rob Malda (slashdot.org), John Styn (CitizenX.com), Matt Williams (Amazon.com), and Howard Rheingold (rheingold.com).

One of the things I learned is that in some cases it's a good idea to "bury the post button." By making users read through your entire article, and *then* supplying the "post your response" button at the end, you automatically filter out all but the most interested readers. Your discussions will stay on topic and have higher signal-to-noise ratios.

Powazek says: "Web communities happen when users are given tools to use their voice in a public and immediate way, form intimate relationships over time." He goes so far as to say that sites without community-related features are doomed. "Any Internet technology that does not allow for its users to communicate directly with each other is doomed to failure."

After reading this book, you'll feel like you've designed a community already, and your next one will be better for it. Recommended. From WebReference.com.

While it is not difficult to find the software tools required to build an online community, experience and insight is harder to come by. Powazek draws examples from his own work and interviews some of the leading lights of online communities to show what has worked, what doesn't, and what you should look out for.

This book invites its readers to ask themselves some questions about the online communities they want to build. Why do you want to build it? What are you trying to accomplish? What relationship do you want to have with your visitors? And how do you plan to keep order, maintain decorum, and enforce the community's rules? These are questions, I'm afraid, that many webmasters and site owners have simply never asked themselves, and boy does it ever show.

Case in point: In my very, very small corner of the web, just about everybody with a small home-based business and a two-bit web site wants to set up a mailing list or discussion board to go along with it. They don't appear to have done much thinking about it, apart from a vague notion that a forum would be cool and would draw traffic to their site. In fact, the biggest site/portal in the subculture I inhabit sells itself by saying that its discussion forums draw traffic to the hobbyist/small-business home pages it hosts and the advertising it sells -- i.e., its forums are its content. Meanwhile, the quality and tone of discussion on those forums is a constant source of grief. These people need to read this book.