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Advice for Websites Combating Net.Obscurity?
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?"
sites and communities fall into obscurity for one of two reasons:
a: They're way to limited in their scope, thereby alienating a large potential audience; or
b: They lack any interesting or original content, and thus don't attract any new members/users.
A lot of webmins are quick to blame the audience for their lack of ingenuity or creativity. Remember - if it's not very interesting, who is going to be interested? Furthermore, if it's not very original, then most people will gather around something that is.
I think the poster is thinking about this the wrong way. When it comes down to it, if no one visits your website, it means that nearly no one WANTS to visit your website. This either means it sucks, is on some topic nobody cares about, or is a mixture of the two.
Even if it's on an obscure topic, it eventually will pick up search engine hits etc... I have friends who ran sound mixing websites and even an RV parts store. They do nothing for advertising and started having all kinds of hits in the first case and orders in the second (very different types of websites).
Anyway, if your site is dying, it's because of a more fundamental problem.
I have worked on many projects which have failed due to a shortfall in uptake. The sites themselves were excellent, and beloved by their userbase - but the userbase just wasn't big enough.
/. style, live CHAT style, or some hideous mix as we did recently these are the key to any site working. Even one that is not there specifically to allow interchange - enable it and you give the site a sense of place - of commonality - of community. It's fluffy - but it works!
Running the risk of a granny egg sucking session, here are some observations of things which HELP a site.
Novel Material / Early News
If your site can be first with the news, or provide good novel content which is interesting / useful enough for people to print / bookmark you have a good chance of being referenced. This is a key FREE way to spread the word.
Forums
Wether
Hard Copies
It sounds stupid - but the sites we built early on, which had a paper newsletter (usually quarterly) asociated with them have done well. People seem to repond to the paper mail and visit the site. Coincide the paper issue with a new feature / big story and you multiply the effect.
Email
Give people a reminder email every couple of weeks - its not spam - they signed up for it. Say something in the email - not just 'visit us'.
Recommend a Friend
Give people an easy way to forward links to the site, and to every individual item within the site straight from the page. We know they can do this easily without a 'recommend a friend' button - but they really do work. Up to 50% of new members are coming from this on some sites.
Stats
Show people how many people are using the site - make people visible, through forums or other mechanisms. If you see a site thats obviously been updated TODAY and has a bunch of visitors your more likely to take it seriously.
And some stuff you would THINK would work but in my experience doesn't.
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.
Too many options
A mature site can cope with tonnes of options to switch this off, that on, remove images, add a reminder service etc... But again, we find that this stuff just puts people off if its there before an established community.
Client confidentiality, DPA, etc.. stops me citing the examples - sorry.
Why don't people visit my website?
Why don't people want to help code my open source project?
Why don't people want to help test my program?
Why don't people go all ga ga over what I'm excited about?
Why doesn't want to go on a date with me?
Most 'community' sites are basically all clones of each other. Pick your favorite subject. There is always a forum, weblog, obligatory Yahho Group. Now multiply that by 50.
...
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
The sites you put up as examples are sites where the user interest is nonexistant. I don't care about a "cute lil' cat" or "cute lil'" anythings, for that matter. I don't think I'm alone among netizens for that. And I don't think that "Magick" has a huge following either.
However, if you want a media system and a belief system that are popular, Star Wars and Christianity are both doing fine.
And sites become popular overnight! Need I remind you of the dancing hamsters and "All your base" phenomena that took the nation by storm inexplicably with only wierdness to pull them along?
Mod me down and I will become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!
Hasn't this always been true, not just with web sites? There are millions of books in publication, but why is it that we only hear of or care about (probably) 2% of them? Because the good ones are popularised while the not-so-good ones get lost in the sea.
python -c "x='python -c %sx=%s; print x%%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))%s'; print x%(chr(34),repr(x),chr(34))"
If it's traffic that you want, try submitting a fairly inane "ask slashdot" question, and make sure to include plenty of links to the sites that you're trying to promote. For good measure, try throwing in a link to a Wired article.
What's this? It seems you've beaten me to the punch.
Seriously, though...can anyone else see that this is a fairly desperate attempt at driving traffic to two VERY obscure websites?
I can only speak to my own sites, particularly Kalvos & Damian's New Music Bazaar, which is dedicated to contemporary nonpop (read "classical new music and electronia").
We started in September 1995 (using RealAudio 1.0, if anyone's old enough to remember that), have won awards (real ones, with money, such as the Deems Taylor Award for Internet journalism presented by ASCAP (yes, I know /. loves to hate ASCAP) at Lincoln Center), and have had nearly 330,000 visitors and 130,000,000 hits since we started counting in 1997.
Those aren't big numbers, and they're also not big money. When you have a kind of 'mission' -- i.e., bringing nonpop to a wider audience -- it takes a lot of time. A lot of time. And folks always want something new, which means even more time. (Even the process of editing, converting and uploading our two-hour radio shows -- real radio, not Internet bitcasts -- for posting takes big chunks of time.)
Like any content-rich site, it's also expensive -- bandwidth, storage (our site is nearly 6GB), software purchases, licenses, travel for interviews, etc. -- even if we (there are two of us) don't get paid. In fact, 80% of the site's cost is paid by us, and fundraising icons and even fundraising sales are ignored. We've had to answer inquiries from licensing agencies, negotiate agreements with composers (are remember we started three years before the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, and had lots of stuff to 'grandfather'. When the New York Times print and online editions featured us at the end of October, we were hit will 11GB of bandwidth overcharges.
We've eschewed the banner ad, kept the site focused on content and not design, and maintained near-complete Section 508 accessibility. As web expectations have grown, so have we, even though we're not a design-happy site.
It's a lot of work, and we're halfway through our seventh year of doing it. People, I think, just tire of 'labors of love' after a while. We're a first-hand case of a site that has received accolades from visitors and media, and as two aging professional composers (both in our fifties) who also have day jobs, it's a pretty exhausting task. To have to pay $5,000+ a year for the privilege of doing it is even more tiring.
Will we go away? Of course we will, either when we've completed our mission (unlikely) or when we're just unable to face another day of watching hundreds of visitors suck down the contents of our site without so much as a dollar sent in via Paypal.
Dennis
http://kalvos.org/
The person who submitted the story has worse spelling and grammar skills than CmdrTaco. That's *always* newsworthy.
Thats the problem - this has broken down because there is SUCH a sea of sites out there that the chance of me 'catching' a good site is minimal.
/. about a year and a half ago when I was pointed at it by a geeky chum to see some piece of new about a new CPU. I've probably pointed a couple of people at it, they caught it too. /. is highly contageous, and easily transmitted.
If you look at sites as virii - I 'caught'
The problem is that the chances of me 'catching' another site is minimised because there are too many sites to visit - so I don't come in contact with the VAST majority of them. There might be a great site dealing with stuff I'm really into that I just never come across because its insulated by a sea of crapola!
If you look at the material on the paper version of this site in the paper version of THIS site there are some good insights into the difficulty of finding your market for a niche product - and the possible rewards.
And to think that I only joined slashdot in 1999! :)
Any technology which is distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
I use a telnet based BBS (located in the UK) - called Monochrome. 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.
Monochrome - Probably the UK's largest internet BBS
I checked out the Dragon Spirit site just to see what it was. The main page told me nothing of what the intended audience was. I had to go to the about link to see who they were targeting (and determine that it was of no interest to me).
/.: Right there on the main page is "Slashdot: News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." Right off, I can get a pretty good idea of whom /. is targeting, and make a decision as to whether I stick around or leave.
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.
www.eFax.com are spammers
I run a skiing portal/weblog community type site... I haven't had any problem getting members. I attribute this mostly to how I've built the site.
1. I don't have any expenses, so I don't care whether I get readers or not. Not a primary concern.
2. I concentrate on making my site interesting and easy to use. This should be your 1st goal, because most weblog/portals suck. IF a potential new user navigates to your site, and there is nothing there that interests him/her, that user won't ever come back.
Slashdot is targeted at the right kind of people for this type of media... geeks. The target demographic has a lot to do what people expect to get from your site. The vast majority of internet users don't understand what a weblog is. From that aspect, you need to provide content in a manner that normal users would understand. For example, my skiing portal is layed out like a magazine, with complete articles, and other diversions.
Have interesting subject matter. Understand your target reader.
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
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.
'sapientia potestas est'
The web was meant to share information. Really! No Really! That's why it was initally created.... Not to sell stuff. No Really....
Idealy, portals are just that, a way to share mass amounts of information and allow users to find their way there. Also communities are a way to share information of a like idea, sport, subject matter, whatever....
It's when you throw in a large commercial aspect of pop-up ads, click here for this, or buy that from me, that people / surfers loose interest in your site. They are there to share ideas and information, not buy something. If they want to buy something, then they'll go to the appropriate store or online store, not a community that sells it. Just go direct to the horses mouth.
A web community that I'm still apart of went through this failed transition. He wanted to make money off of his extrememly popular and traveled web community. He added lots of ads. And took it from a small, focused community, and made it into a large portal. This failed because the focused community only cared about one thing, not the rest. He dropped back to where he started. He then charged a small fee and made a membership section. I paid for a membership. Very few did.
Everyone else jumped ship and went to another FREE community. Communities are easy to build and find. If it's good, and the information is there, people will come. If you force advertisements and memberships or sales down the throats of users, they will leave. Information was meant to be free. Keep it so, and people will come.
My advice:
Don't do it for the money, do it because you love it. Do it because you have something to share. Do it because you want to talk about what you enjoy with others that enjoy the same thing. Don't do it to make a quick buck... It will never work.
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
Didn't you or at least one of your friends go through that 'Nobody likes me, how come I'm not popular' phase? Well, in case you didn't, here is the lesson to learn:
You don't become popular by whining that you are not popular.
This thread reminds me of all the stupid web site surveys I've put up for clients. They ask dumb questions like 'Do you think this site is cool?', 'Would you recommend it to a friend?', 'Do you plan on coming back to this site, if so how often?'.
Nothing says 'I AM A LAMO' like these types of questions.
I agree that building a community is hard. But like others have said so far, it is a social/marketing problem, not a technical one. I think communities are made by leaders, not by good ideas.
there are 2 kinds of people. those who divide people into 2 kinds, and those who don't.
I've been trying to promote my own community web site for about 8 months now. (For those who are interested, the link is in my sig.) I have some practical observations for promotion based on a _very_ small budget: First: your two best hopes are word of mouth and being mentioned by a place that gets _lots_ of traffic. Second: don't bother spending money on something like Google unless you can find a really good demographic to target. I tried this for quite some time and I think I maybe got 3 or 4 people joining for my efforts and dollars (about $300) - definitely not worth it! Third: take advantage of sites like slashdot where you can use your sig, and from time to time post comments which actually are on-topic and attract people. I've done this relatively successfully and been modded up for my efforts because I was careful to post appropriately. Fourth: find portal sites that are apropos to your community site that allow you to submit links. Submit your site. For the amount of effort, this really helps with search engine rankings and a little bit of traffic. Fifth: email people who's personal sites indicate they might be interested in your site. This is unsolicited, but most people appreciate feedback on their own efforts and also are interested in opportunities to promote themselves. Community sites often offer this opportunity one way or another. Six: well, my site isn't "successful" yet, but it's growing slowly but surely. To be frank, I don't really want a _huge_ surge in attention because I'm not sure yet about the scalability of my servers. Be careful what you ask for: I personally believe that slow but sure growth will be worth more in the long run. (And that isn't just sour grapes: I've learned a lot by having people provide feedback. If I had a huge surge, I probably would have ended up with a lot of dissappointed users.)
Helping with organizational effectiveness is our job.
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 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 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.
"with their freedom lost all virtue lose" - Milton