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February 9, 2004
Do online communities need reporters?
Posted by Seb Paquet
Lee LeFever is thinking about the potential benefits of having a
weblog inside (or outside) an online community of non-bloggers.
The combination of a weblog and normal community tools (discussions, member profiles, etc.) makes for an impressive set of resources for the members. The weblog can act as a filter for the various discussions occurring on the site and provide members an easy way to find the most interesting or provocative discussions. Plus, being recognized on the weblog could be a incentive for thoughtful participation.
Another way to look at this is making an online community's weblog a public resource, but making the community private. In this way, the weblog pulls members into the community membership based on what they see on the weblog. I guess you could call it weblog-based PR for the community.
This is an interesting idea. For some time I've been thinking that wiki communities might also benefit from having a journalist or two to help others make sense of what's happening globally. An RSS feed of recent changes just isn't meaningful enough. Back when
Wikipedia was starting out, I recall founder Larry Sanger used to write weekly reports on what had been going on in the 'pedia and I found that useful. Howard Rheingold's Brainstorms community does have an internal volunteer group-edited newsletter called "the Brainstorms Scoop", which helps locate the interesting recent action in the huge volume of messages that the community produces.
In terms of enabling outsiders to be aware of what's going on inside a community and perhaps drawing some of them in, I think a good blogger could do wonders.
Comments (5)
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1. Yoz on February 9, 2004 12:40 PM writes...
There's a great example of this over at the 3d avatar world Second Life (http://secondlife.com/) - Linden Labs, the company behind it, has employed Wagner James Au as an "embedded reporter": http://secondlife.blogs.com/nwn/
One of the refreshing things about it is that they seem (from the outside) to be imposing very few creative restrictions; he hasn't held back from reporting criticism of SL from its players.
Permalink to Comment2. Seb on February 9, 2004 12:52 PM writes...
Great example Yoz, thanks! It reminded me of this other one, which reports on the Sims Online world: http://www.alphavilleherald.com/
Permalink to Comment3. Peter on February 10, 2004 11:31 AM writes...
I've been doing this for eurekster. I have no stake at all in the company's success, but decided it was a site with a good amount of potential, and enough buzz to be successful, that it was worth my time to blog about it.
The site has benefited because I have answered a lot of questions that other bloggers have had and have had a lot of conversations with other bloggers and people in discussion boards.
Since the site has a community component, I've built up quite a network on there too. I have 23 members. The only person with more than that in my network is my contact at Eurekster. Everyone else has less than 5 people.
I think it has also benefited eurekster by aggregating a lot of feedback from users on what they like, don't like and what features they want developed.
I even have a contact at eurekster that feeds me info and passes along answers to questions that I and others raise and they even linked to the eureksterblog from their press room. Its ranked right up there with the Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, WSJ and the Washingtone Post.
Here's the blog: http://eureksterblog.blogspot.com
Permalink to Comment4. Peter on February 10, 2004 11:58 AM writes...
I expanded upon my comment at the eureksterblog...
Permalink to Commenthttp://eureksterblog.blogspot.com/2004_02_10_eureksterblog_archive.html#107643182781703096
5. dh on February 11, 2004 12:07 PM writes...
A weblog can act as a sort of front door to a wiki as well. You don't technically need separate weblog software though, just a reverse date-sorted list of recent highlights. See the (outdated) front page here: http://holton.ltc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/
Also, I created a plugin for Moveabletype that allowed me to integrate my former blog with my wiki: http://holton.ltc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/MoinMt
I think ideally though, a wiki engine should make it so that any wiki contributor automatically has a blog listing their contributions to the wiki. See the the blog posting section here:
Permalink to Commenthttp://holton.ltc.vanderbilt.edu/wiki/MoinMoinHacking
and many of the great wiki ideas listed here:
http://wikifeatures.wiki.taoriver.net/moin.cgi/IdeasToPlace