Advice for Websites Combating Net.Obscurity? 173
waveclaw asks: "A Catch-22: how to initially draw people to a community when the a community itself is the selling point and your being drowned in information sea that the web has become? Many people take the popularity of Slashdot and other 'people concentrators' for granted. Whole communities are developing, as they have done for thousands of years, on web logs and news sites via reader feedback. Unfortunately, not all sites are well traveled. (Side note: a lot of reseach has apperantly gone into this.) For instance, the special interst publication Dragon Spirit Magazine is closing their doors due to a lack rather than surfiet of viewers. Belfy Comics lists an entire section of online-only comics which are (for lack of a better term) abandoned by both viewer and creator.
Porbably the most powerful force obliterating free communication is neither fundamentalist nor jack-booted: it's obscurity."
"While network outages are easy to diagnose by comparison, what does a site do when it's dying? Sites like Keenspace and Webring and wiki try to build self-referential collections of sites and pages that sometimes work and sometimes don't Has anyone out had their back to this wall a lot and come out winning? Short of a listing on Slashdot, how?"
Everything looks the same ..... (Score:3, Interesting)
Nowhere is this more rampant than the linux community.
How many linux news sites running slash/scoop/nuke are linking to all the same stories? Can you even tell them apart?
It doesn't matter where a surfer goes, eventually it all goes to the same syndicated Reuters stuff, ZD FUD, or goatsex.
Everything's been done, we're in a rut
Not just web sites... (Score:4, Interesting)
I use a telnet based BBS (located in the UK) - called Monochrome [mono.org]. It's 10 years old now, and still going strong, although the population seems to remain roughly constant (but aging). It used to primarily made up of a user-base of students, but it has now evolved into a BBS for young adults, and hopefully it'll continue to evolve as time goes on.
I don't know how the admin would choose to try and boost the population however if it started stuttering into serious decline - there seems to be a resistance these days to anything without a web interface or a custom client. Trying to explain telnet to someone who has never used it before can be quite difficult - especially when they try and click on the screen to activate options. The BBS has a java client on the website, but I don't think this really offers the best solution.
The main attraction for people though is the community itself - there are files on virtually every topic anyone would want to discuss, but the files are nothing without the community. People KNOW each other there - in a current vote at least a third of the users claim to know (in real life) 20 or more other users. This is a real life community, not just a virtual one - and a perfect example of how the virtual world need not be entirely divorced from the real world.
-- Pete.
Re:Common Problem (Score:3, Interesting)
Directories
Niche directories sound great. Operate a definitive list of great sources of information for people to access. Hope they start using you as their own bookmarks for this topic. On the whole our feedback shows most people are happy with google, AV, etc... for 90% of links, so don't need this kind of thing. These are costly to maintain well, and of little benefit.
Interestingly I'm part of a team that runs such a site [ukrecscuba.org.uk] and while there is a whole bunch more content, after all its the website of a usenet newsgroup [news], alot of people (at least according to the site statistics) seem to use it as a bookmark substitute.
Why is this interesting? Originally the bookmarks weren't a major part of the site, but the section seems to have grown, taking on a life of its own. Certainly its become the backbone which draws traffic to the site.
Moral of the story? It seems to me that the more popular "community" sites grow, they aren't designed. There isn't any point trying to design a killer community site because you'll almost never figure out what the people want. Its definately not a case of "build it, and they will come" no matter how good your ideas are...
Al.Be clear who you are targeting! (Score:5, Interesting)
Compare and contrast that to
On the web, you have about 10 seconds to grab my attention - then I'm outta here. Too many web sites overlook this rule - 50 second downloads of flash, useless intro pages, a failure to state what their target interest is, excluding anybody who isn't running $browser at $x_resolution by $y_resolution with @plugins.
It's just like real life (in fact, most things online are "just like real life") - if you want to build a group, you cannot needlessly exclude anybody. I belong to two amateur radio clubs - one welcomes anybody to its meetings, licensed or not. The other has two old farts who dump on anybody who didn't work with Marconi (not the company, the man!) and are abusive to everybody else. Guess which club is healthy, and which is dying!
Be easy to join, be clear who you are targeting, stomp on the trolls who drive off new members, don't be too overly narrow in your focus, and you might be able to create a group.
Re:better content? (Score:2, Interesting)
1 - If you put up a Web Site, the only way people will find out about it is if other pages link to it, or you directly tell people about it. At least if you open a shop, people will walk down the street and they can't miss it.
2 - The chances are that somebody has made a slightly better site than yours on the same or a similar topic. The Web is global, so you only need one or two sites for any one interest to please the global potential audience (see
I've been developing Web sites for years now, and I've found that your Web Site will only survive if you want it to. If you keep putting work into it because you enjoy it, and if you can find a clique of users who will enjoy it (forums, message boards and other interactive features help here), then there's nothing to worry about. Your site may remain obscure, or it may grow. If you've done the site really well, and you maintain it well for years, it will slowly blossom. Just don't get impatient, otherwise you may as well not try!
If you really, really want a big site, then you'll just have to find a big gap in the market, put a lot of work into it, get a team to help you develop it, and put a lot of spare cash into advertising.
Maybe its us? (Score:4, Interesting)
Maybe the reason there are so few "good" movies and so few "good" books and so few "good" TV shows is that, at the end of the day, we can't handle too many good things at once?
10 years ago as an undergrad I began watching the web phenomenon unfold and rejoiced as sites like Alta VIsta, Yahoo, Slashdot, mags like Wired etc., online news services began to grow and churn out content... then (for me) came quake, irc, streaming audio, streaming video(!!), mp3s, the list goes on..
.. then something strange happened. I stopped looking. Occasionally I'll do a search on something specific... even more occasionally I'll just browse. But by and large... I go to slashdot once a day now.. check my local news service once or twice a day and thats about it.
Once you get into a routine you become passive... and even though 1000 new wonderful things are out there... you lose the motivation to go and find them.
Its called be luky (Score:1, Interesting)
But what happened with a good meme that is never read by a "good" reader?
Cocacola.com has his audience despite the fact that has no content because they have money.
Each content need his audience, but not always audicen and content meet.
Free speech (Score:1, Interesting)
By the way, if you want to combat this, you might like to visit my website-in-development at www.doublezero.uklinux.net [uklinux.net]. I am developing the code a bit like Slash, PHP-Nuke etc. but it has far to go before it even becomes capable of holding a community, let alone attracting one :->
Re:its called evolution (Score:2, Interesting)
I mean, when was the last time you were in a bookstore just looking for a particular book, and you bought something else because it just looked interesting? Not because it had a celebrity on the front cover, not because you had heard about it on Oprah or wherever. You had an extra 10-spot and just bought it.
Lemme guess. Been a while. Same for me, really. The only reason I started buying any of the old Nero Wolfe mysteries by Rex Stout was because I really dig the series on A&E. Am I hooked on the books, even though a lot of the ones I have read haven't been turned into TV shows? Hell(tm) yes! But I had that impetus because of the show. Without that show, I probably never would have bought any of them.
Same with web-sites. Unless you get that initial "oomph" to check it out AND unless it hooks you, odds are you're never going back. And even then, if you find something newer, shinier and better, it's still a toss-up as to whether you'll stay.
Kierthos
Gotta get in on this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:i've got an idea... (Score:3, Interesting)
Parallel worlds (Score:3, Interesting)
You're streaming audio, and that's going to cost. But you've also found a way around that - send people to composers you feature at mp3.com. Also, many composers have ties to academia, where space can be available.
One thing to remember: the site isn't the community. The site is one location, like a coffee house or bar, where some of the community can meet sometimes. I've been webmastering a site for the Jazz Journalists Association [jazzhouse.org] since '96. Why? Because I share your belief in the value of encouraging real music. What does it cost? Well, I've built it up incrementally, so it's not a big time drain. Content is donated by association members - it's an adjunct to an already existing community. At first it was hosted at a local not-for-profit ISP I volunteered with (to learn the trade - which worked out fine for me). Then I used a couple of hosting services (service quality was problematic - it was Superb and Pair). Now it's sitting on a Speakeasy [speakeasy.net] DSL line, which actually ends up getting better reports from users than hosting, and is a whole lot more convenient to administer. Plus I've got that connection for other uses, so only a portion of the cost is attributable to this project.
Does it create a sense of community? Well, the Association is growing nicely, although conducting most activities in the real world, which makes most sense for an artform that works best live anyway. Attempts to get visitor discussions going on a BBS-type section haven't gone anywhere. People do add occassional comments to stories - but we're not set up as a weblog. Special events where journalists log on together for a few hours to publicly discuss a special topic, with questions coming in from the public, have some success - especially when they draw in existing communities, for instance from special-purpose mailing lists on the topics.
Money? Nope. Referrals for book and record sales have brought zilch. Taking the Association to a formal not-for-profit and pursing grants is the long-term plan.
But to reiterate: It's rare to form a brand new community. But communities are out there, and adding new service for an existing community can more likely find at least modest success, especially if you can piggyback your hosting and connectivity on systems and lines you have other good uses for.
Re:better content? (Score:2, Interesting)
To continue the storefront analogy, people will often use your store not because it's the best place to go, but because it's convenient for them; on the way home from work, down the street, whatever. On the web, -everything- is convenient, and people are always more comfortable with what they're familiar with.
So even if you have the greatest site on a topic in the world, if someone has something that's not as good, even if it's a -lot- not as good, people will still read there rather than your site, simply because it's more familiar, and there are the intangibles that come from having a history with a site. (C'mon, don't tell me you longtimers don't get a whistful twinge at the thought of Signal11.)
Really, if you're not the first kid on the block, you need to have something -really- spectacular to get and hold a crowd.