Bumped into a fun little in process web community this morning.

An in process web community for listmaking.  A dot org in process web community for listmaking.

Kind of an awesome idea, I think.  And I'm curious about the dot orgness.  Might be as simple as a powerful aversion to ads.

Also curious about people's first lists, the ones that leap to your mind the moment you first visit listable.org.

Mine both involved the NBA: Basketball Players That Deserve Way More Love Than They Get and Basketball Players I Wish I Could Play Against (And Beat) Every Day Forever.

Apparently people in the biz refer to 8tracks as "the legal Muxtape."

I just spent 10 minutes, yanked some mp3s out of the trash, and made my first mix:

I would love for there to exist an online community than enables the easy and elegant exchange of mixtapes and the stories behind them.

Bummer if the industry and the law are preventing people from building it.

Definitely the first time Perez Hilton has ever showed up on this blog.

And that fact (and his post) raise a few questions:

A. Is Perez actually sad about NPR?* Seems like lots of his readers (an impressive percentage of whom, hilariously (and awesomely), represent themselves with pictures involving boobs or shirtless dudes) are not sad.

2. Is NPR really liberal? Is it really offensive to the Perez Hilton community? Or might some of those people just be spitting back anti-intellectual propaganda? Someone sometime somewhere some way convinced them that the elites were out to get them, and they get freaked out by anything that feels in any way academic or theoretical or learned (that how you spell lear ned?)?

d. Huge bummer that NPR is feeling the financial squeeze. I think they create real value. Great news. Great interviews. Great analysis. And, while pledge drives make me crazy, I love the theory behind their voluntary subscription model. They ask people to name their own price, to pay what they can. And that makes so much sense in so many ways. Clearly, it's vulnerable, however. I'll be curious to see if they step up the fundraising efforts in some way.

*Note: Sorry to show my liberal bias with a link to The Huffington Post.  I don't really even like The Huffington Post.  But they post the whole cutbacks memo from the NPR CEO, and I figured that's probably the most useful thing to read at this point.

This quiet little Pownce acquisition has me curious.

Six Apart bought the company, hired the founders, and gave all the users their (our) two weeks notice.

Just seems weird.  Like there's a great story behind it somewhere, and we're not going to hear it for a long time.

But maybe that's just because I want there to be (and am pretty well convinced there is) always a great story to be told. In all situations. About everything.

But back to Pownce for a second.

I want to know what it's like to be Leah Culver right now.  Pownce was her thing.  She built it.  As a founder and a developer.  And now, unceremoniously, she's saying goodbye.

Why?  How? 

Is Leah crying or relieved or swimming in money or tired or sick of doing the entrepreneur thing?

Someday we'll find out I guess.

Scribbling away in my notebook, I felt like I was in class.  I type too loud not to use pen and paper.

Being in NY is always a high speed experience, so I figure it begs some high speed blogging.  Or, more accurately, some high speed note transcription and commentary.

-Make sure you model the core features of your community-based website on community interactions that already exist in the offline community.

-In reputation economies, be sure to reward quality first and then quantity.  Beware of Harriet Klausners.

-Apparently Yahoo! remains relevant, and not just because of Flickr and delicious, which feels weird to admit.

-Reward high quality users with labels that explain WHY they are high quality.  Probably don't need to use as many labels as Yelp does, but throwing a few around is a generally good idea.  It attracts attention to the right people for the right reasons.  The "gardener" label on ma.gnolia is a great one (and part of a great anti-spam system).

-Reward NEW people.  Right away.  Don't make it hard for them to get in on the rewards, the labels, the recognition.

-Be careful with lists of highest rated users.  Competition can get out of control.  Collusion happens.  Your community turns into Survivor.  And, when the leaders get out in front and hard to reach, people lose interest.  Maybe the thing to do is to give competitions time limits.  Have a weekly MVP.  Or monthly.  Or yearly.  Don't have a leaderboard.  This reminds me of fantasy baseball.  Head to head leagues are WAY more fun than rotisserie.

-Be careful with thumbs up thumbs down systems.  They tempt competitive users to thumbs down content that they see as threatening to them, stuff that might very well be the most valuable content on the site.  Maybe just have a thumbs up.  Or a was this helpful question.

-When you make members of your community angry, for whatever reason, before you explain or defend yourself, say you're sorry.

-Encourage people to "tell others what you think."  Ask people to offer their "unique experience."

I especially love that last one.  Because I think it's true.  In a big sense.  In life just as much as in web use.  Everyone's experiences are unique, and they're all fascinating in their uniqueness.  We all have stories.  Great stories.  Unique stories.  Stories no one else can imagine.  But we don't always tell them.  Maybe we have silly insecurities about lacking uniqueness.  Maybe we have trouble communicating.  Who knows.

Ok.  Pretty speedy.  More tomorrow.

Note: Thank you XBOSoft for the invite to The Expo.  And for lunch at the only restaurant on 11th Ave in Midtown.  Funny to speak Chinese in an Irish Pub filled with construction workers on lunchbreak.

So I sent Yammer a question through their feedback collection tool:

Are we allowed to create collaborative networks of people that don't share email servers? I can imagine creating a network of people that yammer back and forth, for business reasons, but we're not all at the same company; we're working on a side project together. You guys interested in having groups like us on Yammer?

Maybe I'm asking that Yammer lose focus on the ONE THING it wants to do well, but maybe they'd be smart to let non email-affiliated people use their tool. 

I guess one problem with that, however, is that us non email-affiliated people probably aren't going to want to pay for access to our own little grassroots network.  Hmmm.

One asked about niche communities and whether there'll ever be another Wikipedia-scale open source research project.

I responded once last night, but it was late, and I didn't have full brain function, so I just responded again.  It's too long and ridiculous a comment for me to leave sitting lonely deep in a thread, and the metaphorical element gets silly, so I'll pull it out and throw it up here...

One more thought about the Balkanization of online communities.

I think there's a key difference between what Wal-Mart and CNN (and Yahoo!) offer and what online communities offer.

Wal-Mart, CNN, and Yahoo! offer (primarily anyway) goods or info for us to CONSUME. 

Online communities offer consumables as well, but, compared to superstores and big box media, they offer huge opportunity for their users to PRODUCE.

Wikipedia is an unusual case.  It's consumed at the 500lb gorilla level, but it's produced by consumers.

I think it achieves its high consumption levels in large part due to the breadth of its offerings, but I think it's important to remember that there aren't that many people that contribute heaps to Wikipedia. Its long tail of contributions is unusually long and thus hugely valuable, but its core contribution community isn't so big to make it unreplicable.

And I think it's also important to remember that no niche contribution community will need to be nearly as big as Wikipedia's.

And important to remember that having very specific barrels into which we can drop our knowledge might be a very good thing for knowledge quality:

Maybe I'm a trapeze genius. I know everything there is to know about trapezes. I hope there exists a small but totally passionate trapeze community that can stimulate and challenge me as I open source my trapeze wisdom. If you throw me in with a bunch of clowns and lion tamers, I might get discouraged by their inability to speak my language, and my trapeze knowledge might never find heirs.

But maybe this rant is irrelevant. Maybe what you really want to know is how we might weave lots of small communities into big, broad info sources for consumption? How we might harness the niche communities to create another Wikipedia or five?

I think we take the trapeze wisdom and dump it into Wikipedia, for one.

And I think we also set up some well designed info aggregators, info organizers, and info synthesizers.

Collect knowledge in the niche barrels, let the people that care most and understand best turn the knowledge to wisdom, and feed the wisdom into broad reaching, cross-referenced enlightenment disseminators.

Maybe?

For example, I tag myself with energy, sustainability, dinosaurs, and metaphors, and I tag Radical Transparency with energy, sustainability, and Ween. 

And then the matchmaking begins.  Or something like that.

But you're the expert.  You have a good thing going.  I love the simplicity.  I love the integration with existing blogs (I'll be playing with that in a couple of weeks when I'll have no internet but my cell phone email for 5 days).  And I love that you responded to feedback so fast.  Means a lot.  Makes me root for you.  Makes me want to keep thinking and offering you guys any ideas I have.  Well done.

Hmmm.

I wonder what happens if I cc post@posterous.com on this email.  I'll trim up the text below and see.  I hope you don't mind.

When we do our initial research, we're going to try to keep our bullshit sensitivity low.  We want to take our agnosticism to a pretty serious level. A level that borders on ignorance maybe. 

And then we want to listen.  We want our users to question things.  Question the gold stars.  Question the experts.  Question us.

Hopefully we can bake some of this culture into the tool itself.  My guess, however, is that we're not going to achieve it unless we get those first few hundred active community members engaged and on the bullshit meter page.