(This blog has been moved from previous blog site)
‘Build an information site around the community, and not the community around the site.’
The internet is a common meeting ground of communities, and in this world of communities I stumbled upon http://www.librarything.com (LibraryThing). This is a community built around people interested in reading books. Users can upload info on the books they have read, add tags, comments, and the all the activities related to an online community.
The main reason I liked this site is because the data about the books is populated through data sources from other sites such as amazon, library of congress etc. So this enables me to go to a single site to store and get info about a various variety of books.
Now extending this to any other business, this is a great way to get “eyeballs” on your site. What the business is trying to achieve is getting users based on not only the specifics of the particular site, but also people using the site for search/storage/communication and research purposes on topics related to the general essence of the site.
For ex. looking at the site – http://research.microsoft.com – generally people who come to this site would be interested in topics related to research going on at Microsoft. However would it be possible to increase the eyeballs in this site by actually allowing people to look for data, such as reseach and technical papers, from other sources (like citeseer or rexa) and saving the information on their personalized page. Then building a community around this data, which could be of different projects, research topics etc. for people to collaborate on the research projects. In a nutshell the http://research.microsoft.com site is used for research and collaboration purposes by all the people looking for any research data. To this community site one can attach ads related to Microsoft Research projects , which in turn would drive eyeballs to specific Microsoft Research projects as well.
To end – I believe it is much more essential to think about aggregation of data from various sources while building a site. Communities can make or break the success of a site in this current age, and the more you can enable people to gather data and collaborate in a common place, the more successful a site you can have.
