[I’m just going to keep adding to this one throughout the conference]
Gather.com‘s new community, designed to create a national debate in preperation for the upcoming electrion: createdebate.gather.com
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Friday am update – according to the conference wiki (and this post on the conference blog), the sessions from the main hall are being webcast:
- Live Audio Stream (MP3)
- Live Video Stream (WMV)
Thanks to the StreamGuys!
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Brendan Greeley from Radio Open Source describes using WordPress as a kind of gateway drug.
Companies in the long term may need more flexibility or more community-based functionality that WordPress easily provides, but WordPress gets them a pretty signficant bump in the right direction.
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Earlier conversation this morning about user generated content- more about that later – lead me to this principle: become a user first, before you become a provider.
It ought to be like Covey’s fifth habit – Seek first to understand, and then to be understood. Just like you need to be aware of blogging to be starting a blog, you shouldn’t try to create a blogging platform for your station, show, company, band, etc., unless you’ve spent at least some time reading blogs.
Before you go build another YouTube clone, make sure the business stakeholders funding and asking for the project have actually seen user contributed video and the features of several other UGC based sites.
Observe the community before participating in it.
This shouldn’t be a barrier to innovation, of course, but if you’re trying to “get a piece of the action” on some existing trend, make sure you understand it from the inside before you try to replicate it.
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One good measure of a CMS is how well the data in your CMS plays with other applications. How easy is it for you to produce new formats when they arise?
Be a user than provider is very true. As a web development shop, the best clients you have are ones who will openly let you tell them about the principals of building websites, blogs, shopping carts, open source, content management systems, and can be talked out of annoying flash intros, company-jargon, banner ads et al. That way they don’t need to be a user first themselves, but get the guidance and benefit of consulting one :)