Right, the virtual community is now live, kinda. You can find it at http://virtualcommunities.eu. Be warned: it isn’t pretty.

But prettiness can come later.

So, the point of this site is to create a community platform using different social media services. The point being that I already have a blog, and a flickr account, so why would I want to bother logging into another one in order to contribute? Through the wonder of widgets and RSS, Virtual Communities tries to create this online utopia.

Let’s go through the various media and talk about how each can be contributed to.

1. Photos

There is a Flickr group called Virtual Communities. All you need to do is join the group, and then add some photos to it. The content is displayed on the VC homepage through a Flickr ‘badge’ which displays the latest 5 images. The ones there now are just some random ones I chucked up to test things out.

Check – is this the right way? Could we just use a particular tag, thus making it even easier?

2. Video

This uses a VodPod pod called (guess what?) Virtual Communities. This works best as you can add video from a number of providers to it, and it produces a nice widget. All you need to do is join the Pod, and start adding video to it.

3. Events

An Upcoming widget for the Virtual Communities group displays upcoming relevent events. Of which there are currently none. This was added after the screenshot above was taken, by the way.

4. Blogs

This is an RSS feed which aggregates a number of blogs (those of Messrs Wilcox, Dickson, Mitchell and, er, me). This is done through the rather mega FeedJumbler. This combined feed is then spat onto the page with MagpieRSS.

Check: Do we want all blog posts? Or could we use a category or tag based RSS feed? Both WordPress (hosted and non-hosted versions) and TypePad are both capable of this…

Also – would it be better to display cotent from blogposts, and give them a bigger and more central lump of the screen?

5. Links

MagpieRSS once again comes to the rescue, this time chucking the latest del.icio.us bookmarks that have been saved with the tag ‘virtualcommunities’.

Check: this probably needs to be changed to a more specific tag that people aren’t likely to use by accident…unless the accidental is actually more fun?

6. Slides

There is a group on SlideShare called Virtual Communities. Oh yes! Anything added to it is republished on the VC homepage with a rather marvellous widget. Anyone can join the group and any presentation can be added to the group.

Next Steps

It obviously needs a redesign, and a decent stylesheet putting together. But it works, I think. It needs a central combined RSS feed, but FeedJumbler can do that. Maybe another combined feed to track comments on all the different services would be cool too (if possible!).

Other services that could be included are something like a shared box.net account, which can be added as a widget for sharing uploaded files. There isn’t a wiki, and I am not sure how one could be incorporated into this model, other than through tagging wiki pages in del.icio.us. What about audio?

If this is a model that people are interested in, I’m quite happy to package up the various scripts it uses and make it available. Another option might be to host other communities of this type at (say) http://virtualcommunities.eu/anothercommunity. The bandwidth on my side wouldn’t be much as the services are the things taking the hits.

Creating some kind of web based framework around the whole thing, allowing people to create communities and add stuff to them using a web interface would be really cool, but waaaay beyond my capabilities.

Please do provide feedback, especially those involved in the earlier discussion – is this the sort of thing you were thinking about?

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Warning: mildly incoherent rambling ahead…

I’ve been giving a lot of thought recently to what the best way of creating online communities are. This is partly Simon Dickson’s fault.

Back in March, Simon wrote, in a post titled “Because you can’t do bettr than Flickr”:

I’ve just started work with a local community group keen to build a civic website. I’m looking at open source CMS solutions like Drupal as the base system… but I must admit, I’m wondering if the best idea isn’t simply to aggregate stuff from elsewhere…

Take the example of photo sharing… you won’t find a better website than Flickr. So why not just create a group, and let the members feed into it. Let Flickr take all the pain of hosting, user access rights, etc etc - not to mention the expense. That’s why they’re there. Meanwhile, you just consume the various RSS feeds (or whatever) back at base.

The more I consider it, I think this use of best-of-breed web services to add content to a community is the best way of doing things. The problem is with what you use as the ‘base’.

For example, VodPod is a great way of aggregating community chosen video content in one place. It also provides neat tools to display the content through the use of embedded widgets, which work within blog sidebars or within the bounds of a static web page.

It’s easy enough to create Flickr groups, or even just use tags, and use the RSS feed to republish the content and provide links back to source, as Simon points out.

But how to assemble it all in one place? You could have a central blog, which the community members contribute to – but then that kind of goes against the spirit of the enterprise. What would be better would be that members author their own blog posts, and choose in some way whether or not they make it to the community or not. WordPress blogs could manage this as it can produce feeds for individual tags, for example. Another option might be to use a specific de.icio.us tag and pull in headlines from that feed.

So, what about the base system? Drupal could do it, but it’s complicated! You could hack together a batch of pages using MagpieRSS, for example, but it would be a lot of work to get something looking professional.

One option would be to use WordPress and the FeedWordPress plugin to aggreagte blog content to fill the main page, with other media content in the sidebars. But there is a problem with this approach, which is that the RSS feed won’t include this supplementary media!

Perhaps something could be done with Yahoo!’s Tubes system, but I have to admit to not entirely understanding that.

Does anyone have any ideas on how various social sites could be pulled together successfully?

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Thought it might be worth a quick plug of another little blog I write, called Free as in Beer.

All I do is post a link and a quick description of a zero-cost bit of software. Why not have a look – you might find something useful there!

Tags: free+as+in+beer

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VodPod is a really cool way of collecting and republishing video. The way it works is this: you create a pod, which is a library of video you have chosen as being particularly good, and then add to it using a bookmark in your browser. Easy. The videos can be hosted on YouTube, Google, blip.tv… anywhere!

The other cool thing that VodPod allows you to do is add a widget to your web site, allowing people to watch the latest things added to your pod. You can see the LGNewMedia version in the sidebar to the right of the screen. Just click a video to launch a pop up media player. Nice!

There is a social element to VodPod too. Anyone can join a pod and start adding material to it. So feel free to visit the LGNewMedia one and add some video!

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Have no idea where this is from originally, it popped up in an RSS feed for a del.icio.us tag. Excellent stuff, though!

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The Daily Telegraph have put together a great social element to their website – hosting user blogs at my.telegraph.co.uk. I have signed up and the interface is very nice and clean. There’s a social element too, where you can add other My Telegraph blogs to your blogroll and keep a track of comments and whatnot.

Also, on the posting window, some nice quick tips on writing blog posts are presented:

I’ve registered my blog there, but am not sure what I’m going to do with it. Just one thing has occurred to me: will each blog pick up the considerable google juice attached to the telegraph.co.uk domain?

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Nice to see that Gordon Brown’s campaign site is running the latest version of WordPress…

Thanks to Simon Collister for the link.

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Presentation is the key to tip #7. This applies to both the appearance of your blog site as well as the standard of your writing.

Picking up the latter point first, I think a good standard of writing is vital. It doesn’t have to be brilliant, just competent. I’m basically talking spelling and grammar here. There is nothing worse than reading blogs full of weird spellings, txt spk, un-punctuated sentences and, my personal number one bugbear, errant apostrophe’s. So check your words before you write them. It makes you look more professional, and like you care more, as much as anything else.

See if you can include some graphics or images to accompany your text to enliven the appearance of your posts. I’m pretty useless at this, as you can probably tell by the text based nature of this blog so far. The one thing I do do, though, is try and grab logos and things from other sites to use to brighten things up.

Templates and themes

How your blog looks is important. Don’t believe people when they claim otherwise. Often the argument goes that as people are going to be reading you through your feed anyway, what does it matter? The answer to this, of course, is that people have to visit your site before they can subscribe, and if it is some multi-coloured nightmare with scrolling text and other horrible c1997 type stuff, they aren’t going to be subscribing to anything. Here’s a quick list of stuff you might want to bear in mind:

• Make sure your site is reasonably standards-compliant so that as many people as possible can read it. Check it with the w3.org validator
• Ensure that the site won’t take too long to load - so not too many fancy graphics!
• Try to keep things clean and simple - ensuring that your navigation is obviously separate from content, otherwise people will be confused
• Let us know who you are: let’s have a photo and some contact details on the blog home page
• Don’t have a gigantic blogroll on your index, which makes the page go on and on and on. Have a separate page for links if you are desperate to show them off
• Make it clear where people can subscribe to your blog - a little orange RSS icon never goes amiss!

The other issue is what your blog system allows you to do to tart up your blog to add a little extra content which might well enrich your readers’ experience. Why not consider:

• A list of recent posts towards the top of the page
• A recent comments list
• A Flickr badge showing the latest photos you have uploaded
• An update from del.icio.us on the latest sites you have bookmarked
• Clickable icons for readers to subscribe with their aggregator of choice

There really are tonnes of options to have a look at - check out what your blog engine will let you do!

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Number 6 out of the 10 tips on blogging is on keeping notes. Writing blog posts that are interesting and well-informed isn’t easy. Sitting down in front of your blog editor waiting for an idea to come is pretty hard. Ideas for posts, though, can hit you at any time. So you need to be ready, with a system for taking notes that you’re comfortable with.

While you are browsing the web, or reading through your RSS subscriptions, you’ll often come across posts you like and want to have another look at later, or maybe just save a quote from it and the link back to the post. I used to keep a copy of a text editor (like Notepad on Windows) open all the time to copy snippets into. This is still a pretty good system, but there are far easier ways of doing it.

Google Notebook is great for storing post ideas. You can select text on a web page and then insert it automatically into a notebook entry - no need for copying and pasting. You can have several notebooks (I have one specifically for this blog, for example, as well as my personal blog) and divide them up with headings. It’s possible to turn them into pseudo-wikis too, by inviting friends to edit them and making them public as web pages.

Similar ways of storing notes like Notebook are the other free wikis that are available, like WikiSpaces, BackPack, PBwiki or Stikipad. I use WikiSpaces myself and it’s a great, simple solution for those that are new to the world of wikis.

Your reader will probably provide a clipping, sharing or news bin type feature, where you can store or mark posts for future reference. You could also post interesting tidbits to your del.icio.us account.

The advantage of these solutions, being web based, is that they are accessible from anywhere. But if you would prefer a system saved on your own computer, or a USB key, say, then you don’t have to stick with the text file option. TiddlyWiki provides a full wiki experience inside a singe HTML file you can run on your PC without being connected to the web. It’s worth mentioning here, though wildly off topic, the GTDTiddlyWiki for fans of Getting Things Done, which is great.

Of course, you can always just write things down. Get a nice notebook, like a Moleskeine maybe. Or just fold a sheet of A4 into quarters and use the different sections for organising your notes.

So it’s really important to have a system you like for holding onto posts and information you’d like to use later. Part of the joy of RSS is the fact that you can access so much more information than before - but keeping a handle on it becomes harder. Fortunately the tools are out there to help you. So try them out and stic with the one that works for you. Your blogging will become much easier, and the ideas will flow!

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Linking makes your blog grow in popularity. There are three reasons for this. One, it makes your blog posts more useful if they provide links to what you are talking about, rather than making people hunt stuff out themselves. Second, the people you are linking to will realise you are talking about them and come and check you out. Thirdly, doing plenty of linking will do your search engine profile no harm at all.

Links really are what drives the blogosphere. If you get linked to by one of the big boys, like a Scoble, or a Rubel, or even a Dale, then you’ll find your traffic goes through the roof. It will also give you a boost in the search engines. So if you are generous with your links, giving people credit where it’s due, providing readers with plenty of extra reading material, it’s got to be a good thing.

Sometimes, links to your blog can mean disaster. I’m talking about a link from a site like Digg, or Slashdot. Both these sites have an eponymous ‘effect’ that can spank your site’s bandwidth and possibly bring your blog down. This might not be a problem if you have a hosted blog, but if you pay for your hosting like I do, you could end up with a big bill! That this has never happened to me is testament to my policy of writing deliberately uninteresting and non-linkworthy posts. Honest.

What if you have seen an interesting story but don’t have much to add? There are two ways of dealing with these. One is to set up an account at del.icio.us - where you can bookmark pages for further reading. You can then set up a daily posting, so that your links appear in a bulleted list in a single post every day, thus making the stuff you are reading available to your readers too. The other method would be to create a link blog, a separate blog where you dump either full text or stripped down versions of the posts you read.

I prefer the del.icio.us method.

Playing tag

Another way of providing links is through tagging. You’ll notice that a lot of posts on this blog have tags, links at the bottom of each post that send you back to Technorati, a blog search engine, to look up a certain key word. These are a great way to get traffic as anyone who searches Techorati for those keywords will come across a link to your blog. It’s already the biggest source of traffic for this blog.

Comments

Comments are important. You must allow them on your blog, let people give you feedback or start a conversation. Receiving comments on your blog are a great sign that people are taking notice of what you are writing. Treasure the comments people leave - and always do the courtesy of responding, even if it is just with a ‘thanks!’.

When you link to someone else’s post, why not leave a comment there while you are at it, linking to your blog or even the specific post where you mention it? It’s a good way to get some more traffic. But only do it when you actually have something to say, otherwise you are effectively spamming people’s comments. That’s bad.

You can subscribe to comment feeds with most good blog engines (well, I know WordPress allows it). This can be a great way of tracking conversations you are interested in. You can use services like CoComment as well. Some blogs offer the ability to have email alerts when people respond to a comment you’ve made - why not see if such a thing is available for your blog?

Links and comments make the blogosphere go round. Make sure you’re fully engaged with them.

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