Consider, Poole explains, how the fixed identities in other online communities can stifle creativity: where usernames are required (whether real or pseudonymous), a new user who posts a few failed attempts at humor will soon find other users associating that name with failure. “Even if you’re posting gold by day 8, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, this guy sucks.’ ” Names, in other words, make failure costly, thus discouraging even the attempt to succeed.
Tag: community
Stack Overflow
Every question in Stack Overflow is like the Wikipedia article for some extremely narrow, specific programming question. How do I enlarge a fizzbar without overwriting the user’s snibbit? This question should only appear once in the site. Duplicates should be cleaned up quickly and redirected to the original question. Some people propose answers. Others vote on those answers. If you see the right answer, vote it up. If an answer is obviously wrong (or inferior in some way), you vote it down. Very quickly, the best answers bubble to the top. The person who asked the question in the first place also has the ability to designate one answer as the “accepted” answer, but this isn’t required. The accepted answer floats above all the other answers.
this will hopefully kill the inane programming Q&A forums. i hate forum software.
No Yelpers
these are the canaries in the coal mine. within 2 years, every business will find reviews a challenging environment (hopefully in a positive way)
Airplane Chat
Developed internally at Virgin America, the system is named Red and provides live satellite tv, movies, mp3s, games and plane-wide chatting. Yes, chatting. There is a general chatroom, a private invite channel for your friends, and direct user-to-user mes
Google and the Geospatial Web
What they are going for now is much more ambitious, and indeed a bit more risky. And so I applaud them for it – they are putting a stake in the ground that says ‘our best ideas are not behind us’. They are going to be a leading force in a much bigger pie.
Scale matters
The Tragedy of the Conversational Commons that comes from being able to hijack an audience to get attention for your own views becomes too persistently tempting when that audience is large. At large scale, John Gabriel’s Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory cannot be repealed.
Women in Tech Communities
good summary on male / female communication styles
Open Cities
What happens when people working on open source, public space, open content, mash up art, and open business work together? How do we make Toronto a magnet for people playing with the open meme?
Maps Easter Egg Hunt
i love pamela’s playful evangelism
Ongopongo
Ongopongo accepts links to any kind of map. After finding or creating a map, submit a link to the map with a title and short description. Share maps with any kind of content, but please make sure it’s a direct link to at least one map. Some of the best submissions so far have been about a trip with photos and video, favorite places around town, and maps showing locations united by a common theme.
heh, already more shared maps than ms after one day.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 