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Title: Design for Community: The Art of Connecting Real People in Virtual Places by Derek M. Powazek ISBN: 0-7357-1075-9 Publisher: New Riders Pub. Date: 09 August, 2001 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $30.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.5 (12 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Need-to-know information for community builders
Comment: I'm in the process of retooling an online community myself, and Design for Community has given me a lot to think about. It's extremely useful. No one should try to build an online community without reading this book first.
While it is not difficult to find the software tools required to build an online community, experience and insight is harder to come by. Powazek draws examples from his own work and interviews some of the leading lights of online communities to show what has worked, what doesn't, and what you should look out for.
This book invites its readers to ask themselves some questions about the online communities they want to build. Why do you want to build it? What are you trying to accomplish? What relationship do you want to have with your visitors? And how do you plan to keep order, maintain decorum, and enforce the community's rules? These are questions, I'm afraid, that many webmasters and site owners have simply never asked themselves, and boy does it ever show.
Case in point: In my very, very small corner of the web, just about everybody with a small home-based business and a two-bit web site wants to set up a mailing list or discussion board to go along with it. They don't appear to have done much thinking about it, apart from a vague notion that a forum would be cool and would draw traffic to their site. In fact, the biggest site/portal in the subculture I inhabit sells itself by saying that its discussion forums draw traffic to the hobbyist/small-business home pages it hosts and the advertising it sells -- i.e., its forums are its content. Meanwhile, the quality and tone of discussion on those forums is a constant source of grief. These people need to read this book.
Rating: 5
Summary: The definitive book on getting people involved
Comment: This book crops up a lot in recommendations from bloggers, and it's easy to see why. This book is a broad, yet detailed, treatment of how to start, grow, and manage, online communities. A successful online community (such as the thriving javaranch.com) has a real and valuable sense of belonging. This book can help you understand both the 'why' and the 'how'.
Most of the points made in this book are applicable to everything from email lists, through bulletin boards, to blogs, Amazon reviews and beyond. Many are also very thoughtful, such as the discussion of setting "barriers to entry", or the tricky subject of how to gracefully end a community. The book also includes some interviews with people involved in specific online communities. These interviews are not as directly useful as the rest of the book, but are an interesting alternative to the author's style.
If you are at all interested in gathering or supporting a group of real people using online tools, you need this book. It doesn't say much about specific tools or technologies, but it has the ever-elusive quality of "lasting value". I can really imagine myself re-reading and referring to this book in five or even ten years time.
Rating: 5
Summary: a powerful book with lasting value
Comment: This book crops up a lot in recommendations from bloggers, and it's easy to see why. This book is a broad, yet detailed, treatment of how to start, grow, and manage, online communities. A successful online community has a real and valuable sense of belonging. This book can help you understand both the 'why' and the 'how'.
Most of the points made in this book are applicable to everything from email lists, through bulletin boards, to blogs, Amazon reviews and beyond. Many are also very thoughtful, such as the discussion of setting "barriers to entry", or the tricky subject of how to gracefully end a community. The book also includes some interviews with people involved in specific online communities. These interviews are not as directly useful as the rest of the book, but are an interesting alternative to the author's style.
If you are at all interested in gathering or supporting a group of real people using online tools, you need this book. It doesn't say much about specific tools or technologies, but it has the ever-elusive quality of "lasting value". I can really imagine myself re-reading and referring to this book in five or even ten years time.
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Title: Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability by Jennifer Preece ISBN: 0471805998 Publisher: John Wiley & Sons Pub. Date: 15 September, 2000 List Price(USD): $50.00 |
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Title: Community Building on the Web : Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities by Amy Jo Kim ISBN: 0201874849 Publisher: Peachpit Press Pub. Date: 06 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
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Title: Blog On: Building Online Communities with Web Logs by Todd Stauffer ISBN: 0072227125 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Osborne Media Pub. Date: 14 October, 2002 List Price(USD): $29.99 |
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Title: The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier, revised edition by Howard Rheingold ISBN: 0262681218 Publisher: MIT Press Pub. Date: 01 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $24.95 |
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Title: The Wiki Way: Collaboration and Sharing on the Internet by Bo Leuf, Ward Cunningham ISBN: 020171499X Publisher: Addison-Wesley Pub Co Pub. Date: 03 April, 2001 List Price(USD): $44.99 |
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