Carson Workshops Archive

Ted Rheingold from Dogster/Catster discussed passion-centric communities. I thought his presentation really hit on the key points to create success with a PCC. Here are some of the notes from his presentation.

Ted sat down with CenterNetworks for an interview »

What is a passion-centric community?

• Dedicated to a single particular interest
• Usually includes human profile sharing
• Nothing new
• They amplify passion thru enriched community experience

Core Components of Passion Centric Communities

• Entertainment
• Sociality
• Services
• Information

Other Features

• Design must amplify
• Moderation
• Groundrules
• Safety policies
• Wngage how they prefer

Sincerity Cannot be Faked

• Offering features that can be leveraged
• Passions do not fit into buckets
• Monetizing the long tail not for us
• Don’t ignore your community

Looking at Monetization

• Advertising and sponsorships
• Subscription programs
• Selling member-made or site-specific items

Making Advertising Work

• Keep your ad sales inside
• Adveritisers need to have a direct connection to the communities passion
• CPM is almost dead
• Require advertisers to offer something real to the community

Future of Passion Communities

• For every passion there will be a site and could be more than one
• There will be tens of thousands
• Apis and badges bring the communities to where the member is
• Public and open id systgem will be used
• Web is just a launching point – cell phones, etc. — communities will meet where their members are

Sites Ted Likes for Passion-Centric

• deviantart – 2 million members
• amateurillustrator
• cnet community
• fabsugar
• modelmayhem
• mlg
• Yahoo! autos customs
• carspace
• boompa
• feelingbullish
• socialpicks
• mybloglog
• famster
• clubmom
• craftster.org
• vampirefreaks.com
• yourclimbing
• everytrail
• cute overload
• twitter

Mike Davidson from Newsvine was the last speaker of the afternoon. He was holding us back from making our way to the Google party so he had to be on his game. He was the only presenter who started with a story. I appreciated the ice breaker.

Here are some of his comments:

• With a user generated content site, much of the content that is created is crap
• Myspace does a great job of turning trash into treasure
• del.icio.us is great at extending your memory
• Second life game – talked about the importance of this game but that his machine is not fast enough to run the game
• Social sites must be able to scale to be effective

Some of his reasons why social networking works today but did not work 10 years ago:

• “Always on” factor, even more important than the speed
• Much easier to find and contribute
• Much better publishing tools

What’s Working:

• Letting users do what they please – i.e. comments
• Keep comments on
• Dunbar number – which basically means that you should limit groups to 150
• Top user on Newsvine in August earned $400

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 | Carson Summit | Future Web Apps | futureofwebappssf06 | mike davidson | futureofwebapps-sf06

Carl Sjogreen from Google Calendar reviewed the Calendar project and the success they have experienced.  He seemed to wonder why so many people signed up right away. Carl, same reason why people will buy a new iPod even if there is nothing different about it from the previous version. Because there is a “cool” factor in being a first-user and also because it comes from a trusted company. Below are my notes on pieces of the discussion I found interesting.

The Road to Google Calendar:

• classic google product team
• 1 project manager and 3 engineers
• origin from both customer feedback and internal interest
• seemed like a space with little innovation – nothing out there was “right”

Talking to Customers is very important for these reasons:

• Talk to real customers
• Spoke to many people, sometimes even in their homes
• Key themes emerged quickly

He feels its important to have a vision.

6 key insights that might be useful for your next product or company:

1. Easy is the most important feature
2. Know your real competition
3. Visual design matters
4. Build products for people who don’t want to use them
5. Timing launch properly — make sure it’s the right time, it is hard to do, only have one shot
6. Driving usage

Lastly he mentioned the, “akl system”. I assume he means the acknowledge system of verification for changes. If anyone can confirm, please let me know.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 | Carson Summit | Future Web Apps | futureofwebappssf06 | Carl Sjogreen

Tantek from Technorati discussed Microformats. From speaking to some attendees, they felt like this was the best discussion of the day. Really useful information that can be put to use by everyone in attendance. The basic idea is that Microformats are a way to use HTML to a new level. He showed ways to take basic HTML pages and turn them into vCards and hCalendars with very little work. I suggest downloading the presentation using the link below.

The presentation is available here:

http://tantek.com/presentations/2006/09/microformats-practices/

What are Microformats?

• Microformats enable the publishing and sharing of higher fidelity information on the web
• Building blocks that enable users to own, control, move, and share their data on the web
• Small bits of XHTML that identify richer data types like people and events in your webpages
• The fastest and simplest way to provide an API or your website

More than just "good class names"

• principles keep things micro
• process emphasizes getting real
• community minimizes duplicates

Microformats Principles:

• solve a specific problem
• simple as possible
• Humans first, machines second
• Reuse from widely adopted standards
• Modularity/embeddability
• Decentralized development, content, services

Microformats Creation Process:

• Pick a specific, simple problem and define it
• Research and document current web publishing behavior
• Document existing formats in the problem area

Dick Hardt opened the session with a discussion of Identity 2.0. The discussion was only 15 minutes. I think he could have used at least 30, maybe an hour. This could have been the most interesting discussion of the day had it been more in-depth. Here are some of my notes:

What is identity? Who are you. The basics is that just like a credit report, past experiences predicts future experiences.

Dick recommends a book — The Innovators Dilemma by Clayton Christensen

What is digital identity? It is what's behind your usernames.

Dick talks about Microsoft's Info Card product and that it appears cool. He states that Google and Yahoo! basically are one login for multiple sites but that the sites are in silos. And that while Passport by Microsoft has basically failed, the Info Card product holds potential.

eBay's reputation system uses a past predicts future model. He suggests eBay is the best in this area today.

Some of the companies using Identity 2.0:

• Wikipedia
• Slashdot

Final thought from Dick: eBay could use reputation as a central housing point. Other companies could leverage the eBay reputation system and pay to post reputation points.

Kevin Rose spoke about Digg and its successes. Here are my comments, slightly edited:

Kevin opened by calling his presentation a "preso"… Site has been live since end of 2004. Presents an overview of Digg and how the site works. A new function called "my number 1" was added to the site yesterday which allows you to make your important stories even more important to each user.

Startup background on the Digg site:

• Held interviews for many companies and Slashdot, Del.icio.us and Friendster combined together to come up with the idea for Digg
• $2,000 to start, using a developer on elance for $10/hr.
• Open source architecture
• Basic design
• $99 a month hosting

Talked about the types of design for a web app:

• basic utilitarian design
• cheap crappy design
• and high priced quality design

Initial launch plan:

• 200+ blog readers
• Users with personal passion for technology
• Limited functionality
• Highlight users – diggnation

General comments on "success":

• Spread by word of mouth, no advertising
• Give your developers a chance to play and try out ideas
• Tagging won't work on Digg
• Hire experienced DBAs

Explaining about the "Digg Effect"

• Digg should never take away traffic or cache content, should always push to site creator

Some Digg Stats:

• 500k registered users
• 10million pages a day
• 1 million daily unique views
• 90+ boxes

Future plans:

• Learning from users and then making suggestions to friends and stories
• Digging other types of content online

QA session:

• Will there be an API? Yes, an API is coming, and a digg button on your site is coming
• Whats your take on ads? we always tried to keep the site clean, would like to keep it the same as they have it now and can become profitable with the current amount ads.
• Timeline of the company? started with Kevin and a programmer ($10/hr), $50,000 investment from a partner, hired the programmer full-time, brought in a CEO to gain a round of funding. Today at 15 staff, most in ops and development.
• Can you remove data? we will be rolling out a remove mode in the future.
• Will you be expanding search? Yes, we will be working on a better search soon and moving away from a mysql search. 
• what's your take on paying the top users? we want to keep it as fair and equal as possible. The most popular content comes from all users. We are different than Netscape in the fact that we do not pay our top users.  
• How do you collect user feedback? We collect through e-mail and we have a person dedicated going through all of the feedback we receive.

My comments on the presentation:

Kevin (like most of the other presenters) needs to refine his presentation style, felt like a developer talking to other developers. Would have been nice to open with some interesting fact or story rather than just jumping into the presentation. Felt more like he read us the about us page for most of his presentation.

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0 | Carson Summit | Future Web Apps | futureofwebappssf06 | Kevin Rose

Tom Coates from Yahoo! presented about Social Change on the Web. His presentation was great and his presentation style really kept the audience engaged. Here are some notes from his presentation (comments are raw and unedited):

Tom discusses MySpace as a unit, not at the individual pages. Social software is a long line of software and started all the way back with things like alphabet and writing. Doing more together than we could do apart. Social software definition: Using software to enhance our social and collaborative abilities through social mediation.

• An individual contributed should get value from their contribution (individual motives)
• These contributions shold provide value to their peers as well(social value)
• The organization that hosts the service should derive aggregate value and be able to expose this back to the users (business value)

Concensus – many contributions make one voice (wikipedia)
Polyphony – Many voices with emergent order

Wikipedia works because of the process and order they have even though the Concensus model does not work and is not replicable

Polyphony model offers much more ability to succeed. Offers infinite communities. Tom talked about the motives for why people share in a community.

Why do people contribute to open source software?

• learning to code
• gaining reputation
• scratching an itch
• contributing to the commons
• stick it to microsoft

Another way of looking at why people contribute

• Sharing without really knowing it
• Saving for personal use
• Sharing with friends
• Sharing with interest groups
• Self expression and showing off
• Good of the world

Things that don’t work well:

• Be wary of clumsy incentives like money, points and competition

Open up social value:

• expose every axis of data you can
• Give people a place to represent themselves
• Allow them to associate, connect and form relationships with one another
• Help them annotate, rate and comment
• APIs are cool

Problems:

• Be very careful of user expectations around how private or public their contribution is
• Be wary of creating monocultures
• Remember not all your users need to participate to generate social value

Business value – wheres the money

• Attention and advertising
• Premium accounts
• Building services around the data
• Using user-generated annotations and contributions to grow own information

Rise of aggregate data:

• proprietary data sources own a space
• they license their data initially selectively
• increasingly fluid and commoditized services emerge with flat-rate data provisions