Nick Lewis: The Blog

Like a tornado, online communities only form under certain conditions. If you're looking to build an online community, understand that they are very difficult to build artificially. They seem to only emerge from natural conditions. Indeed, you can help them emerge, but you can't *create* them in my experience.

Below, are the 6 essential conditions that I've observed as necessary in building online communities. I think three to four of these conditions are the bare minimum for a reasonable chance. All six would guarantee that a community would form -- probably whether their Dr. Frankenstein of a creator liked it or not. 

The Six Conditions

I. The community creates a meeting place for people who didn't previously have a place to come together. This is probably the most powerful condition, as its very difficult to create a community if a larger one already exists somewhere else.

II.  A sense of shared ownership between the members of the community -- something they can point to, and say "this is ours -- and its worth defending".

III. At least one strong leader to keep conversations going. They lead in the sense that they set the tone for others to follow, but do so only by example -- they don't order people directly. This person is usually willing to devote an extraordinary amount of time to the effort.

IV. A shared identity among members. The may share a love of baseball, or want to dominate the shady underworld of hand modeling insurance policies. It doesn't matter what the goal is, as long as its felt that everyone shares it, and is passionate about it.

V. Members have an opportunity for personal gain: be it career, reputation, sex or education.

VI. The conversations within the community are entertaining in itself. Indeed, there doesn't need to be a goal; there just needs to be a doggy treat to keep people coming back.

While this list isn't complete, I can't think of anymore conditions. Can anyone else?

Anyone who works a lot online will agree that this project is a godsend.:

The concept behind the StupidFilter Project originated during a conversation between Gabriel Ortiz and Paul Starr. StupidFilter was conceived out of necessity. Too long have we suffered in silence under the tyranny of idiocy. In the beginning, the internet was a place where one could communicate intelligently with similarly erudite people. Then, Eternal September hit and we were lost in the noise. The advent of user-driven web content has compounded the matter yet further, straining our tolerance to the breaking point.

Writing those sort of headlines makes me feel like I need to to take a shower. Yet, sometimes the truth is dirty, and the truth is that Rupert Murdock "gets it".

Fox has annouced that that they will use their network of sites to offer downloads of their televised content. [see news story]

Now, admittedly, this pay-per-view model sucks the private parts of goats. Who wouldn't pay 1.99 for an episdoe of 24? Well, let's see....

Everyone.

However, these things evolve slowly, like the law. Sooner or later FOX will realize that there is far more money to be made from offering vidoes for free, and using whatever methods are possible to force consumers to watch 40 second ads for pringles, or the airforce. 

Jon Lebkowsky is right, this is an eye-popping thought: Ugly design = successful website. It’s a controversial claim; and but that’s about all it is.

You needn’t know a thing about design, or websites to see why this claim is complete humbug. Observe the logic:

Premise 1: Myspace, google, and craigslist are successful websites

Premise 2: Myspace, google, and craigslist are badly designed

AOL has always been an easy target for ridicule. So, when I found out today that AOL was trying to take on gmail with a new public beta mail service, I jumped at the opprotunity to test it out.

I was disappointed to find out that AOL did a number of things right with their new service; in many ways, I'd say its superior to gmail. Namely, AOL's webmail wins hands down in terms of:

• Overall user experience
• Overall design

However, even by the most charitable measures, AOL's webmail still loses to google. The first reason being:

A snippet worth framing: 

The attractively simple thesis of The Change Function is that most tech-nology ventures fail because tech-nologists manage them. Technologists think their business is the creation of cool technologies loaded with wonderful new features. They think this because they are engineers who thrill to the idea of change. By contrast, Coburn says, "technology is widely hated by its users," because ordinary folk loathe change. Therefore, any new artifact, no matter how much its various features might appeal to technologists, will always be rejected by its intended customers unless "the pain in moving to a new technology is lower than the pain of staying in the status quo."

This is crazy cool:

Swarm is a graphical map of hundreds of websites, all connecting to each other. It updates itself every second with where people are going and coming from. As sites become more popular, they move towards the center of the swarm and grow larger. Conversely, sites that lose traffic move away from the center and grow smaller. Website traffic is symbolized with thin lines. Each time you see a line appear, it means someone has moved from one site to the other. You can gauge how many people are swarming around based on the number of lines.

Okay, so time for a confession. I use AOL instant messenger for IM. Its not that I'm unaware that there are better clients; really its just that I'm lazy, and all of my contacts are on it.

As most AIM users have no doubt noticed, everytime you sign on, a stupid AIM browser opens up, and you get to take a quick look at the AIM homepage. This is a picture of the one I saw tonight:

Now this is worth sharing for a number of reasons.

AOL's Potential Investors Should Take Note of How Effectively Instant Messenger is Targetting its Ads -- As a matter of a fact, AOL is even aware of the fact that I'm a 24 year old male who works as a web designer. I'm not a brilliant programmer, but I know for a fact that if I had data on a suser, I could easily return specialized content to them. And that's why I thought it was so brilliant that they decided inform me that Shakira is back.

That's right SHARKIRA.

And the text, "Just when you thougt it couldn't get any better, Shakira shakes it onto stage" is a priceless gem in itself. As it turns out, when the page loaded, I did in fact ask myself, "can it get any better than this?" Turns out it could! AOL, its really awesome that you know what a 24 year old male web designer is interested in. Thank you.

Who write's the copy for this shit, might I ask? I had to re-read this sentence several times before I was fully able to take in its satanic lameness. I urge the reader to re-read it several times too:

Axl Brings Back Rock!This "Rose" has a 'tude

Okay, the quotations around "Rose" were nice. I hadn't initially caught the brilliant play on words the author is making. Get it? His Axl's last name is Rose, and he IS a rose -- cause he's in Guns and Roses. The worst part about those quotations is that the reveal that the author was in fact very proud of himself for figuring that out. Copy writer, we here at Nick Lewis: The Blog are very proud of you too. However, this was just a warm up, THIS is what puts AOL into a completely new universe of lameness:

AOL Thinks if It Greets you in a foreign language, it can be cool like Flickr

That is SO pathetic. Its like some pathetic high school girl who wants to be cool, so she goes and buys the same clothes as someone else. This is like trying to tell someone else's story to someone only to realize that they were the one's who told you the story to begin with..

Oh -- and did you notice?

THEY MISSPELLED GUTEN TAG IN THE PROCESS

Like I said, Holy Christ! AOL is lame...

I just noticed that someone came into this blog via the search, "dog lamp-post sex position."

Now -- I'm not exactly sure what aspect of this I find more disturbing. 1) The fact that someone, somewhere felt they needed knowledge to which this search might reveal or, 2) the mental picture that was evoked by the combination of words.

Regardless, for some strange reason, this search led them to an absolutely wonderful, relatively obscure, and must read essay by a little writer by the name George Orwell. If you are bored (and I always assume anyone visiting this blog is bored) treat yourself to this gem: The Art of Donald McGill

I've recently started reading a blogger named Guy Kawasaki. Strangely, this is the case where the name of his blog, Let the Good Times Roll, is less memorable than his name, and his tagline, "Blogger: Someone with nothing to say writing for people with nothing to do is." is the more memorable than his name. I wonder what Darren would think of such an odd emphasis of taglines/author name/blog name. But as usual, my thoughts have taken this ship wildly off course, and I can only ask you dear readers to pray -- pray for us.