What It Takes To Build An Online Community

In late May, Joel Spolsky, co-founder/CEO of our portfolio company Stack Exchange, wrote a great post called Modern Community Building.

Stack (as I like to call the company) is building out a large network of highly engaged communities (57 as of right now) all focused on knowledge sharing.

Joel described the basic problem:

There are an awful lot of technology companies, founded by programmers, who think they are building communities on the Internet, but they’re really just building software and wondering why the community doesn’t magically show up.

Joel points out an important truth. Online communities require both software and people. Sometimes the software part is the easier part. Curating communities is hard work and requires people to do it. It is an inherently social behavior. Joel describes the role of the "online community organizer":

This job will be sort of like being a community organizer at a non-profit. It combines elements of marketing, PR, and sales, but it’s really something different. I don’t expect that there are a lot of people out there who already know how to do this well, so I’m going to train them, personally. Not that I know how to do this, but we’ll learn together. Every workday is going to start with a huddle at 9 am and a plan for the day’s activities and an intensive six hours of work. Every workday is going to end with an hour of learning... reading Kawasaki and Godin and Ries and Trout, talking with invited experts, meeting with members of the community about what worked and what didn’t worked. Everyone who joins the program (and survives for a year) will come out with an almost supernatural ability to take a dead, lifeless site on the internet and make it into the hottest bar in town. That’s a skill worth learning for the 21st century.

Many of our companies need both community managers and community organizers. And I agree with Joel that this is a new job type that not many people have a ton of experience in. But as Joel says, those who develop these skills will be in high demand in the coming years.

If you are interested in joining Stack's community evangelist team, you can apply here. If you'd like to see all the open community manager positions in our portfolio, and there are a bunch of them all around the world, you can see them here.

Modern community building isn't easy but if there is one thing the Internet has taught me over the past 15 years, large engaged communities are incredible powerful things, both commercially and socially. Building them is important and ultimately very valuable work.

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See Also:

• Globalization (Continued)
• Founder Labs (Continued)

What It Takes To Build An Online Community

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How To Build Your Own Mac For Just $500

I use my Apple netbook almost every day.

You heard me right. Netbook. Not MacBook Air or MacBook Pro, but a 9-inch Dell that's tricked out to run OSX gracefully and without issue.

People have been doing this for years. There are numerous walkthroughs online to tell you how to do this for yourself.

For a small initial investment and a little bit of work, anyone can build a brand new Apple computer. Why not you?

One of the most popular computers to convert into a Macintosh is the Dell Mini series. In fact, Ed Gain started MyMacNetbook.com to spread the word about how to do it.

What follows is a highly abbreviated version of tricking out your Dell to run OSX. Since it's a technical process and might lead to some questions, you'll want to head over to Ed's site to get them answered.

Until then...

First of all, understand that your new Hackintosh will exist outside the realm of Apple. If something goes wrong, you can't take it to the Apple Store to get it fixed, so take good care of your computer.

What you need to get started.

• Dell Mini 10v with at least 8GB of hard disk space

• Mac OS X Snow Leopard retail disc

• Intel-based Mac with DVD-ROM drive and USB port

• 8GB or larger external USB drive (hard disk or flash drive)

• NetbookBootMaker (available here)

• NetbookInstaller (available here)

On your "legitimate" Mac, fire up Disk Utility and insert the OSX retail disk. You're going to create a bootable backup to your external drive or flash drive.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider

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See Also:

• Here's Your Ultimate Step-By-Step Guide To Jailbreaking Your iPhone
• Here's Everything We Know About The Next MacBook Air So Far
• BLAST FROM THE PAST: Check Out These Extinct Operating Systems That Time Forgot

How To Build Your Own Mac For Just $500

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Adobe Software Updates To Help Devs Build iOS, PlayBook And Android Apps

Adobe is today pushing updates to its application development software product Flash Builder and the open source Flex framework to enable developers to build apps for iPhone, iPad and BlackBerry PlayBook, following support for the Android platform last April. Developers can now opt to use Adobe's platform to build apps that work across the Web, desktop and a range of tablets smartphones, with the ability to reuse most or all of their existing code and use common logic across all platforms.

Adobe Software Updates To Help Devs Build iOS, PlayBook And Android Apps

Backlink: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/xrYpUUH5Vi0/

What Is the Best Way To Build a Virtual Team?

stoolpigeon writes "The department I work in is growing and including new members that live quite far apart. Right now most people are in the same office but new members are in Singapore and South Africa, with more coming from other places. I would be interested in Slashdotters recommendations for software, practices, services and anything else that can help build strong virtual teams."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

What Is the Best Way To Build a Virtual Team?

Backlink: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/WtawIeYg1Vc/What-Is-the-Best-Way-To-Build-a-Virtual-Team

My Plan To Build The Next Great Media Brand

As many of you know, today I leave my post as executive editor of VentureBeat for a new opportunity. I've joined the Daily Dot, a media startup, as its founding editor.


What’s that, you ask? The Daily Dot is a bold experiment in open-source journalism about the biggest and indubitably most awesome community in the world: the Web community.



Sixteen years ago, in my very first Web gig as an intern at Mother Jones magazine, the progressive bimonthly, in between publishing articles to the Web, I spent a lot of time answering readers’ emails. Inside the magazine, we were excited about the potential for doing journalism in new forms and ways. But our audience? They wanted to chat.



Wherever people gather and talk, that’s a community. We used to define community by place: a geography imbued with meaning by the people who inhabit it. But as Robert Putnam noted in Bowling Alone, geographical communities have grown fractured through long commutes, television watching, and the general anomie of modern life.



What's replacing them? The Internet, which has become the fabric undergirding any meaningful community today. A few pioneers saw faint signs of this in the '90s, as the potential of the Web first unfolded. But now it's becoming a reality, which is why the time is right for the Daily Dot, the Web's first hometown newspaper.



A decade ago, many critics saw the Internet as another atomizing force, driving people into their CRT-lit basements. That notion of surfing alone has crumbled as the world has gone wireless, freeing us to live in the real world while staying connected to virtual ones. Increasingly, we find meaning through the links established by the screens we carry. The intimacy of touch reinforces the sense that we're staying connected, not separated, through technology.



Since that first gig online, I’ve rocketed from old media to new media and back again, from print to online to television, from Time Inc. to Gawker Media, from NBC to VentureBeat. What I've found works best is serving a community that needs definition and recognition -- the validation provided by fact-finding, reporting, editing and the other storytelling arts.



There are glimmers of this happening everywhere already, from MTV's "Diaries of Facebook" to Comedy Central's "Tosh.0." But I'd argue these experiments still treat the Internet as an exploitable resource, grist for the media mill rather than a place filled with actual people who deserve the dignity of journalism.



So that's what we hope to do at the Daily Dot: Find stories of lives lived online and tell them, in a publication that's not merely on the Web or about the Web, but of, by, and for the Web. The team of writers we assemble will forge links not between pages but between people, and if we do our jobs well, we will find an audience that wants to help connect the dots.



We’ll start with that oldest of online media, the one where I got my start: an email newsletter. (I’m heartened that this low-tech format has become retro cool lately.) You can sign up for it on dailydot.com. It will be issued weekly leading up to our launch, and maybe even afterwards. In it you’ll get a little sample of the Dot’s editorial scope and voice, as they develop in real-time.



We’ll also use the newsletter to tell you about the Dot as it matures, from our methodologies to our startup drama to the business itself -- advertising, new hires, editorial priorities, and more. We are invested always in our readers and what they need and want to know about the online communities they inhabit. Part of this means being radically transparent, something we think is the first and most crucial step towards building the credibility we need.



We’re also not above a little navelgazing -- what kind of self-respecting media organization do you think we are, anyway?



The newsletter will also feature contributions from the most excellent Nicholas White, the Dot’s CEO, and the man who made me dream anew of the immensities of the Web. He’s like a pre-knighthood Richard Branson -- a madman media mogul in the making. That’s a story we’ll tell, too. (Just in case we run out of fascinating people to cover, we will reserve the right to manufacture a celebrity in-house.)



Nick grew up in the news business, and brings a decade of experience running very successful community news operations. His own transition and compelling vision for the future of news is part of the fun for both of us. And the best thing is that he is, and always will be, first and foremost a journalist -- a trait I’ve always sought in a boss.



Over time the newsletter will turn into a series of community assets which will turn into a destination site which will turn into, we hope, the next great media brand. (And there I’ve given away our master plan for world domination. Ooops. Don’t tell anyone?)



If you want to receive the newsletter, please go to dailydot.com and sign up. We’d love to have you along for the ride.



Are you in? Tell me your story, too. Let's go!

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My Plan To Build The Next Great Media Brand

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