community

eBay-backed community site Tokoni leaves beta

Tokoni, a community site for "sharing stories," has formally launched after nearly a year of public beta. It has taken investment backing from eBay as well as the auction giant's founder, Pierre Omidyar, and was founded by former eBay executive Mary Lou Song and Alex Kazim, former president of the eBay-owned Skype. Kazim serves as Tokoni's CEO.

"We created Tokoni to fill the distinct need for an online community where individual stories of life's experiences have a voice and are valued, and where the collective wisdom of the community is celebrated," Kazim said … Read more

Creating a 'Facebook for spies'

One might expect James Bond's MySpace page to list shaken martinis, Walther PPKs, and Aston Martins among his interests.

While that scenario is a bit far-fetched, agents for the CIA, FBI, and National Security Agency are testing a social-networking site designed for use by analysts within the 16 U.S. intelligence agencies, according to a report on CNN's Web site. Instead of posting thoughts on music and movies, the agents use the site--called A-Space--to share information on terrorist activities and troop movements around the world.

The social networking site has been undergoing testing for months and is expected … Read more

Google needs community to make Chrome a Windows killer

Google has a new browser, called Chrome. That's now old news. The Wall Street Journal suggests that it's all about taking on Microsoft, and it's probably right. Glyn Moody cogently argues that this is not about browsers at all, but rather about shifting the ground under everyone's feet to the "Google operating system." He's probably right, too.

Chrome, however, lacks the very same thing that Android and every other Google product lacks, with the exception of its Search/Page Rank technology:

Community.

Mozilla Firefox has community in spades. Mozilla isn't the one developing killer extensions to Firefox like Adblock Plus, Forecastfox, etc. The community does.

Even Microsoft has community in spades, though on the operating system side of its business, not its browser. Look at the ecosystem around Windows and Office: pretty impressive.

Google, however, seems to want to go it alone, whatever the collateral damage. It is telling that Chrome was a secret leaked and then announced to the world, rather than a transparent, community effort. Google did the same thing with Android, creating a closed-door community that left would-be Android developers riled.

Does it matter? Or is Google powerful enough to take on Microsoft by itself, community or no community?… Read more

Community gets corporate in a new ZDNet blog

I was really pleased to see Joe Brockmeier get new digs over on ZDNet, and even happier to see that he's writing a blog focused on community. People talk ad nauseum about "community" these days, but few recognize the science (and back-breaking labor) that goes into it.

Enter the Zonker.

His first real post focuses on where community managers should reside within a company:

The idea that a community manager should be in support, though... I guess that really depends on the company. In my experience, the support group would almost certainly be the wrong group to … Read more

Acquia releases beta of commercial Drupal

Acquia has finally taken the wraps off its commercially supported Drupal distribution, and it looks like the wait was worth it. Drupal was already a great web content management publishing system, but Acquia's spin on it should make it even better:

The release is essentially a hardened distribution of Drupal, complemented with technical support and network service offerings. Code named Carbon for now, the package includes a select set of community contributed modules alongside the Drupal core. Acquia has taken the task of pre-testing, reviewing, and comparing all community contributed modules to offer a set of the most relevant … Read more

Knee-to-knee dining

The perfect table might be harder to describe than you thought. Opinions would, of course, vary; design, structure, shape, and size would likely be the most contentious factors. c But once those were agreed upon, color, usage, and placement might then be brought to the table, so to speak. Regardless of how deep the debate can get, you would at least expect the perfect table to have four legs.

Until now. Here is the min 2 table, having no legs at all. Designed to be placed on the knees of table-sitters, the concept makes sharing a meal more of an … Read more

Open source drives Wordpress to 6.5 billion page views

Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg recently delivered a "state of the nation" address at WordCamp, Wordpress' user and developer conference. It turns out that open source can be very good for business. Very, very good.

Consider this growth at Wordpress:

Page views grew from 1.5 billion to 6.5 billion/month 1/3 of the page views come from VIPs like CNN and LOLCats 120-160 million global unique visitors per month Two million new blogs created for the year 35 million new blog posts (up from 20 million) Wordpress is an open-source blogging platform at its heart. The Wordpress.org project is actively developed by Automattic, the company behind Wordpress, but also by the community, which joint collaboration results in new features rolling out on a daily basis. Wordpress.com then takes these improvements and packages them for the masses:

… Read more

Control, transparency, and customer contributions to open source

Joel West, professor at San Jose State University College of Business, and Siobh?n O'Mahony, professor at UC Davis Graduate School of Management, have produced some insightful research over the years. However, I particularly like a new academic study the two recently released: "The Role of Participation Architecture in Growing Sponsored Open Source Communities." It studies why developers contribute to certain open-source projects and don't contribute to others.

The key? If you want outside participation, you need to deliver more than mere transparency: Developers need to be able to change the direction of the project to make it worthwhile to stick around. (For a quick example of how too much control can stifle a community, take a look at Sun and OpenOffice.)

This is not surprising, but the research is helpful in detailing why this is so, and how firms cope with it. While most open-source projects attract little to no outside developer interest, corporate-sponsored open-source projects start with an implicit handicap by demanding control of the destinies of their projects:

By comparing the participation architectures that resulted from sponsors' design decisions, we identified two types of openness: transparency and accessibility ["Accessibility allows external participants to directly influence the direction of the community to meet their specific wants and needs"].

While transparency offered potential contributors the ability to follow and understand a community's production efforts, accessibility determined the degree to which external contributors could influence that production. In designing a community, sponsors were more likely to offer transparency than they were to offer accessibility to external community members. … Read more

DIR-855: True dual-band Wi-Fi router from D-Link

I reviewed the Linksys WRT610n recently and today I got my hands on the second true dual-band wireless router: the DIR-855 Xtreme N Duo Media Router from D-Link.

Like the WRT610n, the DIR-855 is equipped with two separate Draft N 2.0 access points: one works in the ever popular 2.4GHz frequency and the other uses the newfound 5GHz frequency. These two access points can operate at simultaneously, making the Draft-N Wi-Fi network available to both 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless clients at the same time.

The DIR-855 has the same design as the D-Link DGL-4500 router, but it … Read more