Social SoftwareWhat is it and what works for publishers?

Gavin Bell

O’Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing 2007, June 19th.

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Preamble (these are my informal speaking notes, they help explain the slides, but they are not a script, I do extemporise around them)

June 2007.

I’m not a publisher, I design social software for a living at Nature, the scientific journal, though my parent company is Macmillan

So I’ll own up, my world is social software / web 2.0I haven’t looked at every publisher, I know there are some awesome projects I’ve missed.I’m hoping to find more in fact I’ve been adding some to my talk over the last day and a half

What I hope to give you is a sense of why social software works and what you can do to make something that works for your readership, not another me too project.

To enhance the web as a means of communication and interaction between people

Tim Berners-Lee, 1996

2http://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1996/ppf.html

one of the aims of the web

arguably the main purpose of the web

once we got past pretty catalogs and business card websites

conversation is what makes our world go round

Social software

http://tinyurl.com/445vm

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Social software is a widely defined term for software that allows groups of people to communicate with one another.It is not one to one email and not broadcast nor publishing, but something else

http://www.lifewithalacrity.com/2004/10/tracing_the_evo.html by Christopher Allen.

Term was popularised by Clay Shirky in 2002, but has been in use since hypertext conferences in the late 1980s

Though he now refers to it as “stuff that gets spammed”

It is also not corporate groupware like Exchange or Lotus Notes, nor is it intranetware

Social media

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A very in term at the minutedefining the social interactions around user generated media eg photos or videos

A shift in our language again

Now Jyri Engestrom of Jaiku refers to these as social objects

I quite like this expression, it has broader scope

Our online interactions often have an embedded context, be it temporal or related to particular content, these contexts are important, particularly if you are looking for long term value.

What is a book?

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An excellent thing, as I’m sure you’ll all agree.

paper, printed, shipped, published, editor, a team effort often

I have quite a few, a quip leading to the next slide.

my library

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This is my library, sorry about the scruffy photo

books have immense affordabilityno batteries

usable anywherelightweightyou know how far through a book you are when readingthey are fairly cheap, you can lend themoften longform

but you know this much better than me

I think the book isn’t going away anytime soonexcept in some niches

this is a five year view, given technology changes I can see shifts in certain areas, eg technical books, maybe travel guides

directories and referencedictionaries especially

battery life is a key determinant, the fabled 300:1 contrast ratio is here

Though time off away from the “computer” is still a driver, too much Continuous Partial Attention (cf Linda Stone) with computers

PurchaseReadReferenceRecommendDiscuss

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so what do we do with these books

These are the verbs upon which our experience of books exists

What ever we offer our users needs to be built on top of these actions

Purchase - most people buy books, though some borrow and for some they Collect

Reading - we hope people read their books

some then work for referencehopefully our books are good enough to encourage people to recommend them

finally people discuss books face to face, on the radio, on tv in the newspapers and on the web

At each of these junctures we can support the reader, arguably we focus too much on the first one.

Access pattern Consumption Nature

Web non-sequential By page Digital

Music non-sequential Track vs album Digital

Movies Sequential Entire Digital

Books Sequential Entire* Analog

News non-sequential By story Analog

Magazines non-sequential By article Analog

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As well as looking at the specific relationships that we can have with books, it is worth looking at the type of consumption patterns we have with other media. It’ll be instructive for building a model of how other approaches don’t work for books.

The way we consume media differs

digital vs non-digital

Fiction vs Fact

I’m talking about CDs MP3s and DVDs

music and video have fixed durations and thus are a more fixed experience

repeated listeningsMusic in many ways is the most consumable media

repeat viewings / readings are less common for video and books.

Movies and books lead us to thinking about the nature of consumption and our relationship with the media

so what is is about movies and books

plot is the differentiating factor, once consumed, you can’t put the genie back in the box.However for some films and books repeat viewings do happen, but in general they are consumed once.

Whereas music is consumed multiple times.

Spoilers

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It is easy to ruin the experience of reading a fiction book, yet it is hard to nullify the experience of listening to a piece of music for the first time, a review can only colour your impression, not give the plot away.

the combination of the actions we can have with books, the nature of the media and the affordances they offer

mean that we have media specific relationships

We can not track our relationships with books in the same way we track our relationships with music. A pandora or last.fm for books just won’t work.

Relationships

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how we form bonds with media varies

in fact the whole life cycle can be mapped out

we like a particular columnistsan authora bandour friend recommends a particular book

when the media is digital your relationship can be pretty deep

there are a lot of data points that can be gathered

I’ll show you what I mean

iPod

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who has one of these ?(show of hands)

the iPod is not just a music player

it is a data capture devicewhich songs,which artistslistening patterns

regularity etc

iTunes

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It has a supporting world of iTunes and its music store.

A lot of the complexity of the music player is embedded in the iTunes software

those playlists and ratings

adding musicall forming a longer term relationship

experience led design created the ipodnot features nor a desire for data

they simplified the experience down to the actions (verbs) required in certain contexts, eg the emphasis on playing music on the player and managing in iTunessimple on the player, richness in the interface

much easier with purely digital artifacts

Sadly this is much harder to achieve with books.

I’ll leave you with a thought as we look at some social software examples

Q: what aspects of the experience of reading books can we capture data about?

easily ?

SocialSoftware

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quick overview of the menagerie

and a quick mention of danah boyd

she makes a good point that you cannot create any form of social organisation on the web that does not already exist in the non-online world

the web is not magic, you can quicken things,and place and time matter less

but the basic social organisation of life is there, so you need to be respectful of social norms and expect normal politeness of your participants.

thinking about your social spaces as if they were face to face meetings is important, it makes you think about social graces and stops you trying to create artificial constructs.

Analogies of bars, hotels and restaurants are good places to start, where there is good customer service.

eg Apple and the concierge ideashttp://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/2007/03/19/8402321/index.htm

Blogs

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fantastically useful

excellent for starting conversationseasy to know who the author iseasy to respond to the author

Many publishers are out there with a company blog, which is a great thingvery Cluetrain

Message boards

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Good places for getting conversation around a topic

they can lead to a slightly in and out experience, as users drop in ask a question, get an answer and never return

if well run they can be a great place for reader to reader conversation

again I’ve seen publishers out there with active message boards

Wikis

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I think wikis are good for certain tasks

they are a collaborative authoring tool, rather than community forming

the core activity is writing about a topic, not getting to know other people

(community forms off the back of the social interactions, it is not as explicit a purpose)

I think that they can be good, but they can also be off putting and get out of hand

the term wiki-gardening is well coined. unmanaged they quickly develop a process of new page creation rather than maintenance of existing pages

e-mailing lists

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Personally I think that these are really over-looked.

Some of my best community experiences have been on mailing lists

Like message boards they also need careful attention

Different models for how they work, ask and answer or discussion led.

They can be tremendously effective, but can overwhelm new people with 100+ messages a day.

Social networks

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The richest of the social tools I’d argue

giving your readers a place on the web to call home

often focused around content

they can offer the strongest ties between users

against that they are the most complex and time consuming to build and runand there are not really any good off the shelf products.

this comes from their embedded natureI’ll show you some examples

Web

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some examples from non-publisher led endeavours

for each I’ll try to focus on why I think they work and

who they work for.

I prefer the term community generated content (from Kevin Anderson at the Guardian) as it reminds the publisher that the content comes from a rich collection of people

Flickr

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flickr

the photo site that came into an entrenched market and offered a richer social experience for photography

but not everyone gets it

it is for people who enjoy photography

it is for people who want to share photos,

but really it is about your friends and the pictures they take

sharing life experiences

so my son is there on the left

the reaction of my friends is bound up in the comments that they left to his birth

I can’t extract and recreate that experience on a different photography siteso I’ve a strong tie to flickr

It works when your friends are there,

being on flickr without a network of friends misses the point of flickr

one last thing about flickr, it is a radically different product to how it started outthey iterated hard on getting the social aspect of flickr rightand ignored the clamour for printing out the picturesThey prospered and created something of value, adding printing once they’d made the rest sing

Twitter

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twitter is about the most simple social app I know ofone question

what are you doing

share that with your friendsit creates a dispersed roughly conversation like interaction.

a quiet way to keep in touch with your friends

however it could be replaced by the next bright thingall it has is the social networkand people are fickle

teens especially, danah boyd has done lots of great research into the movements of teenagersparticularly with reference to friendster and myspace.

they move en mass, often abandoning their profiles and conversations

building something with content at its core is more resistant

typepad

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Typepad

a platform for blogging, livejournal and blogger are too

creating a blog as part of a communitya nice space to hang out on, they provide tools to do a lot of the hard work

Linkedin

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professional network

huge now

useful for a large swathe of people

slow high value interactions, changing jobs, marking people I’ve worked with

some nice touches in their interfacethe profile completeness is clever

MySpace

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works because of the music, other people flock there because of the music

quite a teen profile, heavily studied, loosing out to facebook over the installable apps

Facebook

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facebook, taking my world by storm since they added geographic networks.

notable for the news feed, they added this well after launch and it was seen as privacy disclosure issue

people were happy to have their details and activity on the site, but to have it shared with everyone in their network was a step to far

they have added additional privacy management tools now

On a +ve point they have added a way for other organisation to enhance facebook via an API recently and there are now hundreds of them

visually very clean compared to myspace, but without the core content area of music, so potentially vulnerable in this respect, however the multiple network aspect is strong

Last.FM

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music as a social experience

the collected listening habits of a few million users is what CBS bought recently

very nice app, as it tracks consumption, the person really has listened to these pieces of music

simple social layering on consumption, just not feasible with books given current technology

The Guardian

http://tinyurl.com/3d2kdn

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collected commentary of the guardian on a single websitereaders can comment on the commentary

has some excellent features, but has some flaws

http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/060817macdonald/

comments from the public responded to in further print columnsno commitment from columnists to engage with publicnot contracted to do so

no profiles for users, so encouraged heated debate from a small percentage of the users

leading Polly Toynbee reflected on this in one post which asked "Who are you all? Why don't you stop hiding behind your pseudonyms and tell us about yourselves?

At the Guardian they have an active audience of commenters, but maybe not at the level they wanted.

they are and have been moving rapidly to address many of these issues

BBC News

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The BBC blogging about programmes

they are largely programme based giving editors of programmes a space to talk around the issues coming out of audience feedback and encouraging feedback prior to segments going out.

this is newsnight, the issue is a harsh interview with a politician

lets look at the comments

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post moderation, which is the only realistic option.Both financially and editorially

they also track external feedback on other people’s blogs

known as “track backs”

Publishing examples

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A lot of these examples are travel based, but it is an interesting market to examine

DK travel

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on top of the glossy upmarket guidebooks that DK have been making for a decade or more

they have introduced personal guides created by users

dk detail

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they offer paid for printing and podcast of collected guides

user rating and profiles

they are doing a lot of things right

There are many other competitors in this space toothe guardian are here too

and the micro content rating of hotels eg trip advisor

I like the personal guide approach, though, it is quite rich and has a decent amount of sell through potential

also taps into their core audience in a really positive wayseemingly getting yourself into print

sawday

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Alastair Sawday is another travel publisher approaching community generated content

he is taking a slightly more conservative approach to collection using essentially pre-moderation on his comments.

A great way to get field research though for new editions of his books.

Rough Guides

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Rough guides

taking content reuse to the far end

they put pretty much the entire content of their guides online

taking the risk that laser printing costs more than buying the guide and that the affordances of a book out way the costs of getting the content and printing it out.

they have a message board along side it, but they could do with stronger connections between the two.

rockfax

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OK, last travel example, though this one is more of a sport example

it is about climbing.

This is the text description of a climb in Englandthey have thousands of comments on the individual climbs and have been doing this since 2002.

The grades of the climbs are revised in response to climber feedback and this feeds back into the next edition

what they don’t give away for free are the maps of each cliff, though users are free to upload pictures of themselves climbing on each route

so they retain value in people buying the book.

Also they have a really strong community would be wary of driving rockfax out of business as they provide the best guide for allowing them to find routes to climb

A nice example of a closely tied community and publisher.

Radio3

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Change of scene

This is Radio 3, a classical music station from the BBC.the page represents a single programme, it shows the series of programmes the episode is part of and collects repeats onto the same page.

It is an example of the level of content modelling that you need to do to get fine grained enough to allow tracking of conversation about programmes.

They could add comments to these pages and track mentions of the programme elsewhere.

Scholastic

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harry potter message boards

message boards are a great place to start doing social software

you can simply install one of a number of packages, pretty them up and off you go.

However they tend to be a bit isolated from your content. they also don’t integrate will with one another, so you end up with a single message board site or multiple sites and force your users to have multiple logins.

Kids lit

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teenage books message boards

from 3rd party non-publisher

Our most enjoyed feature is our Author Visits where authors visit our community as a featured guest for two-week periods and our members get to interact directly with them.

collating interested people to gether to presumably sell them further books.

Publishers can host this kind of thing more easily

simonschuster

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Standard message board, again appealing to niche genres

it is also useful in that it shows the ratios between reading and contributing, look at the views to replies ratios

most people read, getting them to signup and through the registration process is a significant hurdlemany people get lost at the check your email stage...

1 10 100100 signup10 read1 contributes

so the story goes, the numbers vary but many of your readers will never come back again after their first look around

sf - lovers

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the original “social software”

the first mailing list, which even predates internet email

showing people like their niche genres

LibraryThing

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One of several “I’ve read this, this is my library” type sites

nice concept, but quite a lot of work to maintain for a user

hard for a publisher to run though

I do think that publishers could do more to tap into the energy behind the users of sites like this.

they are after all tracking your books.

reach out to them

penguin blog

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good that they are on typepad, already reaching out to an existing community

spinebreakers looks like an interesting initiative

gothamist

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slight tangent, but publishing nonetheless

gothamist and the rest are a good example of community publishing

community driven features, using flickr for photos, ratingsend us your story, sense of belonging

based on Movable Type, similarly Serious Eats

wiki penguin

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back to Penguin

A challenging attempt to get a bunch of people off the internet to write a novel together

more or less empty page as starting pointtoo much rewriting of early pages made it impossible to continue

brave and thought provoking, but perhaps not quite the right approach, as penguin acknowledge in the blog accompanying amillionpenguins

collaborative writing

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gamer theory from the Institute for the the future of the book

starting with a draftcollaborative reviewing pre-publicationthey published 1.1 and are working on 2.0

Pragmatic programmers and O’Reilly have been exploring this area toobeta books and rough cuts

They tend to lead to stronger books and a good community following.

nature network

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To give you a little of my own provenance

this is from Natureit is a social network platform to support scientific collaboration

The core of it is a connected series of discussion boards

Lots to talk about on hereopenness - you can see the most popular tags are about what to do next with the siteprofilesanyone can create a forum

Allow your users to invite people in, it is a surprisingly powerful mechanism

del.icio.us

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tagging is the new classification

people like tagging, if you encourage them to tag things then you can find out more about them.

they define the tags for themselves, but then given enough context other people will understand what the tags mean via the person

eg Library means something to you, but it means two things to mea code library and a place for books.

Yet despite this opportunity for confusion people seem to get along fine

A small step most publishers could take would be to find out if and how people are tagging their books.

Authors

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two views of authorship

those who have been published

those who want to be published

lots of initiatives in this space eg booktour from Chris Anderson which launched at this conference.

Macmillan new writing

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a pretty successful drive to get new authors from Macmillan. my parent company

not true social software but community based at least

so what do authors get up to?

peter f hamilton

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Peter F Hamiton

one of the UK’s best selling science fiction authorshe runs with a fellow reader a site about him and his books

Q: how could he be better supported by his publisher (pan mac)

What would make him move to a space with other fellow authors ?

wikipedia

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Wikipedia seems to be the place that most authors have their most complete profile.

this is social software of a different ilk, collective profiling of authors,

often in complement to the authors own personal site

and whatever the publisher provides.

Reading groups

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attracting those people who have actually bought your contentsupporting their reading experience

collins

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simple and effective

but doesn’t get you to know the people

lightweightI think there are stronger tools that can be built to support this experience

Involvement& Pro-Am

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The pro-am movementpeople who are amateur, but carry out their interest to a professional level

they are also the people who buy your books, especially the “advanced” ones

These are the 5+ books a year segment as identified by Brian Murray.The ones worth chasing

How deeply involved can the reader get depends on subject

this is reflected in published books

Photography

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Lots of collections of picturesLots of books on how to take picturesSpecialist subjects - garden, macro, wildlife

Very few books on lens design

So how to and pictures are dominant

there are two levels for this community and a very small professional group who make the tools.This pattern follows through many industries, eg cookery vs cookers.

Cookery

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Everyone eatsSome people cook from a recipe

Some people combine recipes

Some people write their own recipes

A few people do food writing

lots of people buy cookery books

there are levels of expertise - you can tap into this exchange

Celebrity

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many read the glossy magazines

People emulate themPeople want the money and fame, but not the intrusion

So the curve stopsIt is hard to become famous too!

there aren’t the expert level books on celebsnot a pro-am area

community works best in pro-am areas

AFTER THOUGHTOr perhaps community on celeb culture will work, but not as an experience led culture, it is ad led about with sell through, it is still a different culture from pro-am

Amazon

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the killer app

scope across all publishers

depth of customers

though they lack the fine data for digital media they have as good as it gets in terms of books.

they are getting to grips with social apps too, on amazon.com you can have a profile page, wishlist, list-o-mania etc

but you have more depth

google mops up the seldom readers (not our concern, Brian Murray)

http://59

A quick word about URLs

These are the hidden design taskThey are vitalThe give names to objects

Think of your friends, books, cars, your house, your officeyour pets

they all have namesyet we let our software decide the names of our webpages.Kind of like you’d let your books be known by their ISBNs

so design themmake themshort meaningfulmemorablepredictablepersistentunique ie one and only one url for a piece of content

Naming a thing gives it a soul. Naming a thing gives you power: like tryng to control demons.

Content

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Some points to sum up on

For it to have longevity and ownership it needs to start with contentthere needs to be something for the social interactions to take place around

Ideally this is something that you can let people link to and see

This is easiest for non-fiction publishing.

Who’ll be the “publisher” for your area in 10 /20 years - wikipedia, hobby website, leading retailer

is there still an “editorial role” or will people make do with Google / Yahoo search results

how much can you afford to let people play with for free (all of it, most of it bar a key diagram)

general fiction is really hard I think there is little binding force to a publisher, it is with the author

I’d argue you can attempt to generate this with imprints, but I’m not the right person to recommend that

How can you help authors, how can you help authors help one another?

generating repeat sales on the basis of one of your books is a good goal for a website.

Readers

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once you have some content with depth

You need to reach out to a core group of people, ideally people with a long term investment in the area

long tail - your content might work as microcontent, what is the shelf life?

architecture of participation, you want to create a space in which collaboration amongst known individuals is possible, friendship formation is a strong bind

network effect - if you can enable these then you might trigger a network effect,the site gets better as you use itgaining growth, interest energy from the interaction between your published content and its readers

What this turns into is up to you - revised editionssell througheg I’d love to see a decent DIY site with how tos and reviews of toolsjust like DK are doing with travel

lastly give your users a space on your site, a profile page, you don’t have to give them a blog, let your users find one another and get to know each other,

Partnership

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starting a community effort is hardyou do not have the right staff in houseit is not a sales role

finding existing communities on and offline and supporting them

Hobbies good, as collections of content they appeal to core groups already

Fiction, niches easier

TV / internet companies are waiting to take over in the reference hobby world

role of editor diminishing

being off the net is starting to hurt

amazon already are the reference point, luckily for buying your books.

Integration

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make your content available in different forms

you want to be part of the web, not just on, inside it

use microformats to allow your content to be aggregated and appear elsewhere

you don’t necessarily need to build a space for people to come toyou can go to them

- go onto facebook or twitter

find tools and people who are using / referencing your content already, make use of it

tagging, tell people what is being used, once you have single urls then find mentions via technorati, use the amazon apis to find people linking to the sell through pages on amazon and link back to them, if it is a blog maybe trackback them.

reach out is the key message, the web is a series of connected conversations, they do not all need to take place on your site / properties.

the more that is spoken about your books the more likely people are to buy them

Software

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the strikethrough is deliberate

you are not making software, you are creating a community, so start small and make something that is focused on the activity of keeping your readers talking to one another.

iterate hard, making software is not like publishing a bookthis is hard to get, what I mean is 40% of the spend gets you to launchthe rest follows the needs of your users, but not the noisy onesbuild to support focused activity, don’t feature add for the sake of it

You go to a bar for the conversation, not the decor or the furniture

Thankshttp://gavinbell.comme at gavinbell.com

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