It seems that these days I've been doing a lot around community rather than just plain coding or managing teams. I'm even helping a company create its own community and things seem to be going well.
Combine that with the fact that many people keep asking me about blogging strategies, software, techniques, best practices and creating online communities, and you'll get the notion that maybe there's a whole section of life out there that I'm starting to get pretty invested in - Creating online communities.
There's a lot I've been learning about, and that I want to share, but I feel like this blog is not the right place for it, because it's just way off topic, and there's a lot of stuff to say.
So I've started a new blog. It's called Community Hacker. It's going to be my writing pad for everything that has to do with creating communities, buzz and conversations online from what I've learned so far. There's already some stuff out there, and I feel like there's a lot still left for me to write.
Why would someone want to read it?
- You are planning to start an online community for your company to create some buzz around your products, but you have no idea where to start.
- You'd like to open a blog and are looking for tips on what makes for good blogs.
- You have an existing blog and would like to learn how to make some money off of it. I'll have tips on that.
- You'd like to see your blog get more popular, but not sure why no one knows it exists. I'll give examples.
- You build online communities for a living, and would like to learn stuff you didn't think about (or teach me stuff through the comments)
- I'm actually open to suggestions. The blog engines supports multiple authors, so if you're interested in contributing some content to the blog, I'm up to try this :)
Here are my reasons:
- have one place I can point people who seek blogging and community advice
- A place for me to keep stuff so I don't lose them later (tips, special plugins, cool stories..)
- Add a new definition to my online persona, that of a community hacker (as in "hacking away to create a community")
- A very deep trial of WordPress, one of the coolest blogging engines I've encountered, and miles ahead of Community Server's features.
- My very own brain dump, when I have stuff I just have to share but don't have the right channel for it.
- The area of community and messing with online sites and configuring them is simply fun for me. I love mucking around with the site, and playing god with my little studio designs. the site keeps changing and breaking every other day due to my stupid mistakes, but I learn a lot from it.
Aren't there already sites like this?
Not a lot. ProBlogger.NET is one of the most famous ones that deals directly with the topics I mention here, but I don't know many that do. Besides, the blog is about me talking about how I see things, sometimes with a very different spin. If nothing else, it will be an experiment for me, getting out of my comfort zone and trying on some new shoes (if you're into bad analogies).