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The live Web: buildings vs. rivers
Doc Searls doesn't say which industry he was talking to, but in describing the static nature of their Web sites, it could easily have been newspapers:
If you're going to stay on top of what's passing by, you'd better check in regularly.
As I said before, a blog is merely a style of delivery that caters to a topic-centered, reader-oriented stream of posts. And that helps build interest, which creates community.
Here, we've learned that WordPress is a great CMS. It's fast, free and -- above all -- interactive.
Rivers and community, of course, take time. Time to build networks and trust with people. Time to moderate comments and talk back with readers and develop their questions into new posts. Time to build the flow.
My attempt to build community with my GreenCity blog (a try to capture our city's interest in sustainable living) started hot and really died back over the summer. I speculated on why with Patrick at Beatblogging.org, but I know now that I'd made a building (or at least let it become one). I'm pretty sure that with a renewed vigor, the site could come back.
But since there's only so many hours in a day and there's that big black hole named print that devours time and energy, it's going to take a concerted effort to take the next step.
Maybe Searls' wisdom can help me make the case.
They were architected, designed and constructed. They were conceived and built on the real estate model: domains with addresses, places people could visit. They were necessary and sufficient for the old Static Web, but lacked sufficiency for the Live one.He continues:
The Web isn’t just real estate. It’s a habitat, an environment, an ever-increasingly-connected place where fecundity rules, vivifying business, culture and everything else that thrives there. It is alive.It's a river. It's all a big river.
If you're going to stay on top of what's passing by, you'd better check in regularly.
As I said before, a blog is merely a style of delivery that caters to a topic-centered, reader-oriented stream of posts. And that helps build interest, which creates community.
Here, we've learned that WordPress is a great CMS. It's fast, free and -- above all -- interactive.
Rivers and community, of course, take time. Time to build networks and trust with people. Time to moderate comments and talk back with readers and develop their questions into new posts. Time to build the flow.
My attempt to build community with my GreenCity blog (a try to capture our city's interest in sustainable living) started hot and really died back over the summer. I speculated on why with Patrick at Beatblogging.org, but I know now that I'd made a building (or at least let it become one). I'm pretty sure that with a renewed vigor, the site could come back.
But since there's only so many hours in a day and there's that big black hole named print that devours time and energy, it's going to take a concerted effort to take the next step.
Maybe Searls' wisdom can help me make the case.
Tags: blog, journalism, live, news, web
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2 Comments
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Comment by Matt Neznanski on October 7, 2008 at 11:56am -
Agreed. And a moderated discussion is exactly what I'd like Green City to become.
The biggest concern I'm having at this point is that getting that kind of buy-in takes a significant amount of time to gain trust and make it worth people's time.
It's a pretty fine line, I think:
Spend too much time writing "posts" and you've created another traditional reporting blog where it's all about you.
Don't spend enough time cultivating reader trust and you'll drop off the map.
The other side of this is tech. I'm looking into Wordpress MU, which (as I understand it) allows WP to act like Drupal and allow users their own blogs, etc. Without this kind of interface, where readers create their own space and start to have the conversations, I'm the gatekeeper -- setting up accounts, approving permissions, writing posts to re-engage -- rather than the moderator.
Trouble is, MU doesn't have very good documentation and the little we've read about it seems a little flaky. We don't have the resources to re-invent the wheel and we're pretty savvy with WordPress at this point, so moving to Drupal is daunting.
Got any ideas?
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Comment by Patrick Thornton on October 6, 2008 at 8:30pm -
Matt I encounter some of the same issues you do.
You're right there are only so many hours in the day. You can have lots of good ideas, and they can start off strong, but many of them take constant nurturing to flourish. With myself, I have to cut back to the projects that I can really excel at.
For you, I would pick a few areas to hone in on. There is clearly a lot of interest in sustainable living in your area. Maybe you could try to elicit help from people in the community to help produce content for the blog. You could act as a curator of sorts.
People are interested in sustainable living. I think your mission is to try to figure out how to get people talking about it at your beat blog, all while not spending too much time on the blog. I think that means finding people who can act as conversation starters for you.
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