Anonymity is a blessing and a curse to online communities. Anonymous posting allows individuals to discuss sensitive topics, from personal health issues to politics, without exposing their identity. On the other hand, anonymity empowers some individuals to make false, harassing, or even threatening statements with impunity.
Aug 302005
Aug 292005
Middlebury College lecturer Barbara Ganley isn’t happy about the decline in literate letter-writing, which she posits is largely technology-related in Blogs and Letter Writing–Reading today’s Sunday The New York Times Book Review. Television is a major culprit, being both passive and essentially isolationist in nature.
Aug 262005
In O’Reilly joins the search engine spam parade, blogger Phil Ringnalda takes print and web publisher O’Reilly to task over what he considers off-topic links on some popular O’Reilly websites. The allegation is that the only reason obscure lodging resellers would buy ads on high PageRank programming sites is for the Google ranking benefit.
Aug 262005
Blogger Lee Lefever, in Blogs and Message Boards, Together at Last on Share, describes a community that has successfully combined a forum and member blogs. That site, the March of Dimes’ Share Your Story, has found that members enjoy posting in their own blogs as well as the main forum.
Aug 252005
Chris Dykstra of Gatheroo discusses community architecture issues in Group Profiles in my dreams. Gatheroo is a software development effort hoping to launch a set of free community building tools.
Aug 182005
The site WIRED magazine once dubbed “the world’s most influential online community” is up for sale. In The Well put on the market, the San Francisco Chronicle reports that one of the earliest online communities will be divested by its corporate parent, Salon Media Group.
We’re big fans of buzz marketing, both in web communities and via other means, but the Vertical Pulse blog suggests that it could go too far in Will Eulogies be the Final Frontier for Buzz Marketing? Of course, it’s a bit of a leap from observing the exploitation of one soldier’s death by his mother to publicly browbeat the President to speculating that marketers may show up at funerals to take advantage of the mourners. Still, we know that marketers will do almost anything to get their message out in a unique way. The article notes that marketers are already enlisting preachers to push products from the pulpit.
Aug 162005
It’s far from being a novel idea, but the Duct Tape Marketing weblog reminds us that “Give and You Shall Receive.”
Aug 152005
Google has long enjoyed a benign image in the general population, a situation that has served them well when they got into gray areas like caching content and, more recently, book copying. In the last few days, though, Google seems to be working to undo their image as a bunch of nice guys who are just trying to make stuff easy to find.
Aug 152005
One of the questions I’ve been asked frequently in the last few weeks is, “What’s a blog?” The question may come from someone watching me type at the local Wi-Fi bakery, or from a business person who’s been reading the blog buzz in the mainstream media.