Slashdot Mirror
Building Online Communities
chromatic writes "I've published an essay about building online communities on the O'Reilly Network. It pulls together several thoughts gathered from observing sites like Slashdot, Everything2, and Perl Monks."
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it's in my head
>> Regular users will develop a sense of community ownership. As a whole, their content contributions probably outweigh yours.
This has to be one of the facts that I've had to face, going into my third community site. You create and direct when the community is starting up. Once its established, your role becomes more understated and less direct. You guide and influence. You don't direct.
"Cultivate a community, and you'll attract eyeballs and ears.." Sweet! Just what I need to expand my eyeball collection!
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
It pulls together several thoughts gathered from observing sites like Slashdot, Everything2, and Perl Monks."
Here's the link to Slashdot for anyone that needs it...
Although it isn't really a community, Slashdot does serve a very important purpose.
Many, if not all of the people here are socially not too great at real in front of people communication. They feel too much of an urge to speak quickly, making them say embarrasing or stupid things. The addition of a keyboard and a delay slow down the communication and allow us to speak our minds.
Without the likes of Slashdot, whole swathes of youngsters would be unable to comunicate at all, and would be unable to fit in, and would end up jumping off a bridge. So online community saves lives.
For quite a while. FreRepublic and DemUnderground have been around for a while. FR since 1997 anyway.
And let's not even harken back to the BBS days. They were much more community-like from messaging to games. If you want to build a community, it takes lots of time. Lots of time.
If you aren't part of the solution, there is good money to be made prolonging the problem
Mostly obvious, but mostly good.
:)
It would have been nice to see more said on the topic of anonymous posting though. The number of times you see AC posts on slashdot which are people with "real" accounts talking about their employers (for example)... this didn't even get a mention.
But I liked:
> Discuss the Community Openly
If I say this is a good idea, do I get $rtbled?
These sigs are more interesting tha
"Community members will continually surprise you, especially if you've never really analyzed an online community before." /. they're always surprising me. I mean, where else can you get up to the minute news on the death of BSD, and the death of Stephen King?
Well, I know here on
WWJD.... for a Klondike bar?
Translation: If you're a newbie, you will get flamed
The issues and themes you find important may never really resonate with your users. They'll latch onto and chase down ideas you've never found important or even knew existed.
Trans: you may still be a loser even if you run a successful weblog, or more mildly, there is always someone who knows more than you about how some random chip inside some old hardware REALLY works.
They'll also tend to develop some strange characteristics.
Trans: like first post, links to prOn, and the like...
Not everyone will exhibit every behavior, but these are general trends in every community I've observed.
Trans: there are some people who put a lot of thought into what they say. Thanks be to God/Allah/Buddha/Krishna/The TCP/IP stack/etc...
Conversion Rate Optimisation French / English consultant
For anyone interested, this months Linux Journal has an article on OpenACS (page 12) which reads, in part:
"It's easy to say that OpenACS is a toolkit for creating on-line communities. But what does that mean? For starters, it means that OpenACS comes with working versions of most of the applications you're likely to want on a community web site. It handles user registration and administration, forums, FAQs, group (including a rich permission scheme), news updates, file storage and distribution, personal home pages, surveys and a we-based calendar. As you might expect from a modern system, administration of the application is done almost completely through the Web, with only a few configuration files."
From OpenACS' frontpage:
WHAT is OpenACS?
OpenACS (Open Architecture Community System) is an advanced toolkit for building scalable, community-oriented web applications. If you're thinking of building an enterprise-level web application, OpenACS is a solid, proven foundation that will give you a 3-6 month headstart.
My
Limekiller
[Humour]
I'm not a professionally-trained sociologist, nor is this formal research. I do find my conclusions accurate, though.
Looks like he spent a little too much time on Slashdot. This is only one step away from
IANAL, but here's some legal advice...
[/Humour]
I am a Karma Library.
Why can't we make better use of the communities we already have? All this constant building new communities does nothing but add to the suburban sprawl that is already a blight on our landscape. ...oh wait... no, yeah. That's right...
FREE KEVIN!
The issues and themes you find important may never really resonate with your users. They'll latch onto and chase down ideas you've never found important or even knew existed.
E.g. Spelling, grammer, content, etc. etc. etc.
I am a Karma Library.
Is it just me, or does the article read like a HOWTO for acting like a civil human. I don't know about you folks, but I've long awaited such gems as... "Like any community, your group will have spats and factions and frictions. These must be handled wisely for the community to survive." or perhaps, "Community members will continually surprise you, especially if you've never really analyzed an online community before. The issues and themes you find important may never really resonate with your users." It could be just me, but doesn't this whole article boil down to people are different, so dont be a dick.. ?
-- El Sacarino tiene gusto de la chocha
Community seems to hold it together.
Community is the same reason that people stick with services that suck (AOL) - they build relationships, and while they may actually grow, in knowledge, past the use of a specific service they still maintain the service in many cases because of the warm fuzzy feeling that community provides.
Secondly would be the community of reliance types of organzations - Ebay - where people rely on seller and buyer ratings as much as anything else to feel comfortable making a purchase in an environment that is otherwise risky.
R
Homer: Facts are meaningless, you can use facts to prove anything that's remotely true!
You left out the eBay Community!
Maybe you should read the book about eBay.
It is interesting when you post a message and read the moderation to see the true views of the people. There are some moderators who will moderate up or down if they agree with the statement or not and there are other moterators that are more fair. Some interesting moderateration messages includes the following.
The Poster Beleaves in God (Even better if the poster admits that he is a practicing Roman Catholic) Insightful 3, Overated 1, Troll 1, Flame 1
Advantages of Windows, and sometimes Solaris over Linux. Instering 2, Insightful 1, Overated 3
Not liking PC Hardware and archecture. Insightful 2 Interesting 1, Troll 2, Flame 1
Python v. Perl or Perl v. Python. Interesting 1 Overated 1
So just like real comunities there are different point of views and an attempt to opress free speach even on slashdot. Wich makes it insterin to know that you can be a outcast amoung outcasts.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
It was a couple of years ago, but IIRC, Mr Katz did a loooong three parter on online communities. Or was it about geeks being left out of society? Geez. Here's a good example of why you shouldn't be too wordy. I can't friggin remember a thing he wrote about. And I read it. Take heed Louis Nowra!
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
Now its been mentioned on
I don't read your sig, why do you read mine?
Provide a way to address individual bits of history (messages, chat logs, event histories) in finely-grained units.
Yess Sir, we do it best at slashdot, all articles are repeated so we do not miss any history ;-)
Some bits may not be worth remembering (Slashdot posts that sink to -1)
OMG! here goes my KARMA, please moderators dont forget me!! boooohooohMy Aurora : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o91ZsGwJYyg
FB : https://www.facebook.com/TanveersPhotography
If you notice my sig, you'll see that I run an online community dedicated to OpenGL programming (and the many facets thereof). I started the community back in March 2002, and I love it to no end. It's relatively small (especially compared to Slashdot), but its an awesome place to hang out and talk with other people interested in OpenGL, game programming, and Linux. Now, enough about my community, here are my ideas about the article.
:)
Regular users will develop a sense of community ownership. As a whole, their content contributions probably outweigh yours...
This could not be more true. Running my site is a full time job (along with school). I rarely get to answer the questions that my members have. Luckily, I've recruited some top notch moderators who answer questions and keep the forums inline. If it weren't for them, members wouldn't come back. Adding to that, I must say also: a lot of your members will know more than you do! Get over it, learn from it. I'm only 18, and have had a limited time using OpenGL, whereas I have many professional programmers in my community. Most people love to help.
Besides letting community leaders and members perform administrative work (content production, content moderation, software development, content rating, the donation of hardware or bandwidth fees)...
This is crucial for a site to survive. At my site, we have tutorials. So far, I've written all but 3 of the tutorials. Tutorials, especially ones as long as mine, take a long time to write. One idea I thought up was to ask members to write tutorials. You'd be surprised how many members want to write tutorials and get work displayed, and on somebody elses website no less! If you need help paying for the site, set up a donation link (PayPal is easy, even with all of the warnings). Many members are willing to contribute something to the site, especially if they see it become something tangible (like prizes to a contest).
Encourage community archives. Provide a way to address individual bits of history (messages, chat logs, event histories) in finely-grained units.
This is a must. New members will want to research to see how the site came about, and things that occured during the sites lifetime. I think that people are very interested in history. They want to know about the past. Keeping archives is not very hard, especially if you can set up an automated system.
You will never please some users. A few will stick around only to see your next mistake. They tend to be vocal. Their pessimism doesn't make them wrong, but it can be grating.
Again, this is where moderators and other regulars to the site come in. When someone on the forums posts something degrading or offensive (yeah, sue me for censoring people, there are some things that are not appropriate for an OpenGL forum. I don't want my forum to be full of SPAM), the moderators immediately step in and either edit the post or delete it entirely. If a user is being particularly harsh, and I am not there to quell them, a moderator will say, "Hey, listen, Vic works his hardest on the site. He's not perfect, and he'll take care of you. Just have some patients." It's a very rewarding feeling when people want to help you with your site without pay. Occasionally, when I make a news post, I'll thank my moderators for their hard work so they know their work is appreciated.
Simplicity may appeal to some users. The lack of sophistication (reply notification, searching, revisions, and access controls) may put off some users, and an ugly or awkward user interface may get in the way sometimes, but a community can grow in spite of the mess.
This is very true. Thus, I approach my community two ways. There is the main news page, the main page of the site, and then there are the forums (similar to any message board you see now). The main page (and subsequent sub pages), are very simple. A DIV in the middle of the page is all that is needed for news. I use style sheets to control the data in there, and all in all, it comes out very nice. I am currently redesigning the main page to add a few more visual controls, but its still very basic. However, when you click on the Forums link, you go to the much more "complicated" forums. There, you can post messages, be alerted of replies, send private messages and email, search for past posts, etc. It doesn't hurt that my forums looks particularly nice.
Finally (I promise, this is my last point), you need something to keep repeat visitors. There must be a way for visitors to interact with the site. No one wants to just read news posts and view a few tutorials. When they are done, they won't come back (I feel this was an underlying assumption in the article, though). Two more ways to keep visitors: Contests! Yes, they cost money, but yes, people love them. Especially when they can get a free Radeon 9000 or 256MB of Crucial RAM (hint hint) from entering it. Even better: use the donations other members made for this. The second way is to give visitors free stuff without you having to pay for it. For example, anyone who is a member of the forums, have more than 10 posts, and contribute well to the community can have their own subdomain on the site (and an email address and a free MySQL database/PHP support). This is better than a lot of hosting plans. Members can use the subdomain to show off their work or write tutorials on a different facet of OpenGL. I require NO ads, but I casually suggest that if they want to link to me, I'd appreciate it.
Well, thats all about me and my online community experience. I wouldn't trade it for the world.
-Vic
The internet (not just the web) allows minds separated by meatspace commune as if they were right next door. It is within this mindspace that communities emerge and evolve.
[I'm intrigued by the common root of commune, communicate, and community. It seems to me that an online community is, in many ways, a truer community than that which we generally think of as a community in meatspace.]
Although usenet (really an accretion of communities) is mentioned in the article, there are other entities, many predating the web, that are more communal than the typical web-based "online community". MUDs, MOOs and their ilk are particularly interesting not only because their members interact in something like real time, but also because the "reality" of the community is a consensual construct of the members themselves. Of course, I'm thinking more of the "building" aspects of M**s, than the "game" aspects.
I recommend this article for another examination of online communities.
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
An OK read, but it was mostly obvious and did not get into the difficult issues of community building -- maintaining subject, tone, reputation and control without becoming unpleasantly authoritarian.
Slashdot does not present these issues in as acute a form as, for instance, a commercial product-users community site. One of the advantages Slashdot has as an online community is that it does not have much of an agenda -- sure, a large portion of the active participants are pro-Linux/anti-MS, vaguely libertarian, etc., but Slashdot itself is not trying to accomplish anything extrinsic to Slashdot and not trying to sell us anything (which is one of the things that makes it good).
Moreover, because of the overwhelmingly young-adult-male audience of Slashdot, there is little that can _really_ offend most people -- as much as we hate to accidently see or click through to the gentleman from the Christmas Islands, a stray repellent posting or link that gets past Slashcode is not going to cause large numbers of viewers to abandon Slashdot, write to Congress, think ill of Slashdot/OSDN/VA or boycott their products.
A commercial site (for instance, a company-sponsored owners group for a particular model auto), however, has more to lose from rude, disruptive or off-topic posts. Additionally, there are difficult issues that a commercial or agenda-oriented site must face -- how does one deal with dissent, with criticism of the product or agenda being promoted or with support of rival products or agenda?
Of course, one reaction (probably that of most Slashdotters) is to hell with those who are trying to exploit "community" to make sales, but I would guess that a good portion of the audience for chromatic's Slash book are interested in the commerce-oriented potential of communities.
Some researchers are actively investigating online communities. At least ones where the reason for the community to exist is educational.
The Collaborative Software Laboratory
Electronic Learning Communities
I think the "reason to exist" for many communities is so members can learn from each other. Thus, this research should be widely applicable.
Disclaimer: I am a student at Georgia Tech, but not associated with either of these labs
I have 4 words for you pal:
Get a real name !
How the fuck did oh'really ? publish your book under a nickname ?
That's what I wanna know.
kthx
This is an understatement!! I have been running an online gaming community (http://www.coldfirestudios.com) for the past 3 years, and I can honestly say that the games my friends and I create would not be nearly as good as they are today without the ideas and input we got from our users. Moral of the story: LISTEN TO YOUR USERS!! Sometimes, they know your product better than you do!
Tell me about it! I have one guy that called himself Pizza da Hutt
HallmarkOrnaments.Com
At first, I was going to respond to the grandparent to say that /. is a community, but on further reflection, I think I would say it is both. You can read /. for interesting links and such and never really see or experience the community aspects. Or you can skip the headlines, and 'cruze the journal circuit' as you suggest.
Clearly there is a lot of diversity of opinion, although moderation tends to reward certain viewpoints closer to the center of the bell curve. The community values as expressed through moderation are not mainstream, and I would say it is defined by a high level of tech knowledge, but I wouldn't say it is fringe.
I love /. because it has a similar feel to netnews in the early days, and the moderation tends to push the trolls and flames further away. It's also pretty clear that most slashdotters have not been around since those early days, so they might not even know what I'm talking about here, but they have the same in-your-face, prove-your-assertion attitudes that were present all along. That's what is cool about it, it bridges between generations of hackers. Some came of age after HTTP and HTML revolutionized the technology of online community, and others were part of the hobbie computer movement that started it all. Moderation means I don't spend nearly as much time reading through BS arguments and other drivel as the old days (essential since the wider ready of the modern internet means even more people who would disrupt things just for attention).
I was just discussing this subject recently. Slashdot, that is, as an effective online community. Considering, it's got a huge reader base and no real specific topic, it's got an awfully effective S/N ratio. As online communities go, what are other, large, non-specific communities do people use? I follow a number of other communities, but all seem to be centered around a single topic, product, or theme. Does anyone follow a less technical, equally large and useful community?
The problem I've found in online communities is censorship. In a community ran website like Everything2
(and even Slashdot, to a lesser degree), censorship is at the whim of the people in power. If they don't agree with what you say, most times you'll have your stuff cut, edited, or removed all together. I had this problem on E2 late last year, and I haven't been back since (A friend of mine logged onto my account to check something, but that wasn't me). I had an opinion that didn't mesh with what the editors of E2 believed, and I was cut as a result. Now in the issue of fairness, I want to point out that my node was about how George W. Bush is the rightful President. It was filled with evidence and fact, not speculation and conjure, but it was still yanked nonetheless. Why? Because the editor that k-lined it didn't agree with me, and they didn't want anyone else to read it and possibly side with me. I've gotten over it, as I said I haven't contributed or returned to E2 since the whole thing happened, but when you advertise a broad, diverse online community where ideas can thrive you must consider that not all the ideas will agree with you, and in the true spirit of open thought one should allow viewpoints from outside your method of thought. And from my experience most online communities don't allow that.
--Reverend Raven
Desperate days demand dire deeds.
it doesn't slow a lot of people down enough. if you are building an online community, i would emphasize the art of not posting unless you have something significant to contribute.
unfortunately, i find that many people on slashdot are so eager to prove their intelligence, they plunge headlong threads they know nothing about, providing "facts" that they half-remember from another slashdot thread posted months ago. (yes, haven't we all been guilty of this).
the off-topic moderation is also not used nearly enough. i have seen threads with hundreds of responses (many modded up to +3 or more) that started when one person made an incongruous computer/car metaphor, and then another one decided to correct him with his own incongruous metaphor. Finally, the thread degenerates into Ford vs. Chevy.
moderation in general is less a measure of the "quality" of a post and more about tone. sound authoritative, you'll get the mods +. sound unsure or angry, and you'll get the mods -.
now i don't mean to whine too much about this, but come on. i can't read about some new PDA because someone decided to make an inappropriate comment about how a palm pilot is like a ford festiva and an iPaq is like a gran turino. the lameness filter probably can't get smart enough to catch those.
the "zoo" doesn't help much either, because someone who makes a boneheaded comments in a discussion about PDAs might be the world's biggest genius when it comes to embedded devices-marking him as a foe might cause me to miss something that actually is in fact, "+1 informative".
what's the solution for this? currently i read at -1, and make my own choices. But-in order to provide the best online community possible, i propose that slashdot extend the "2-post a day rule" that it currently exercises on low-karma posters to everyone. this would gently encourage the experts to save up their posts for a topic where they could truly educate others.
think about it won't you? thanks.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
...and there have been other much tighter online communities. The Well springs to mind.
I guess the problem is the signal to noise ratio...or rather the interesting info to RMS/MSFT rant ratio.
What I don't get is in all this talk of Online Communities there is never a refrence to the very real affect they *could* have in offline communication and community building. Slashdot, may or may not provide and example for this. As far as I know there are no real offline communities of slashdot readers? Maybe a LUG or something. There is great potential in bringing together people, who live in the same area and have the same agendas, with online communities. I think people are seeing the internet way to globally, and not realizing it can be used locally. I've been involved in communities with both an online and offline aspect. The effect is immeasurable, you see the users having a GREAT sense of ownership and accountablity for their actions. Comments made in forums are often catalyst for real world events. Good and Bad. People are connecting in ways that they never could. Constently. The growth and progress of a community is logged through the online aspects, every user builds the history of the movement/group/whatever with their comments. New persons to a geographical area, can ease into the community, as they have the not so duanting option of just posting on a message board! Maybe it's b/c geeks would prefer to sit at a keyboard .. but I don't believe that stereotype. Look at the growth of the LAN party phenomenon. Online community with games and IRC, offline events to bring together that community. It's a simple concept that could be applied anywere, but isn't.
I believe we can harness this power in every aspect of society. Then will we be using the internet to it's potential.
I'm extremely interested in this topic these days actually. If you can point me in the direction of material or would like to explore this idea with me. Feel free to contact me.
Word to me.
Well, slash is good and I am a slashdot addict. But I prefer wikis to build something together.
:-)
...it is another book. ;-)
In "The Wiki Way: Collaboration and Sharing on the Internet", Bo Leuf and Ward Cunningham (c2.com) describe two ways of interacting in a wiki : content pages (as found on wikipedia) and discussion threads (there are many of them on MeatballWiki).
Most wireless communities use wikis. And it is fun!
But, I agree,
Seriously. If it's that important to you, find an admin (member of the god usergroup) who (for preference) is a Republican (I think The Custodian, not sure), /msg them and ask them if it was justified or not.
If the writeup was actually worth it's salt, then it'll get restored.
As an aside, the editors get shuffled fairly regularly, so unless you know who it was and they're pretty high up, there's a chance that s/he's no longer an editor. Nukes get checked by admins.
which would make your 2-pager much wittier than Derek Powazek's "Design for Community",which i also liked. he covers much the same territory and reaches similar conclusions...
& th thing i have to remember is that different users have different perceptions of what's complex or not... so that the user interface becomes a filter for the type of user a site will draw. black pages, obscure icons and no text labels will appeal to certain folks--among other things, it lets members know they're cool because they're web-savy enough to figure it out. so the techne carries content just like the wording on the homepage...
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chromatic, i read and enjoyed your article - very well written, very informative.
'If possible, avoid giving the impression that the rules are a game. People like to push the boundaries, and some users only participate to provoke responses in others. Constantly changing the invisible rules under the hood may, if this leads to visible effects for normal users, lead some users to experiment to find and to exploit the actual rules. Apply the rules consistently and calmly and you will remove many psychological rewards for deliberate infractions.'
this is probably the most tightly condensed kernel of truth wrt online communities i have ever read. it bears repeating, often, until the point sinks home.
speaking as someone who actually spent time extending slashdot's documentation, i hear a lot of where you're coming from.
have you considered reposting your article in your journal? (-:
- -s.
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Worse than that, the entire article presupposes open, public "communities". What if I want to do community-building within my place of employment? I certainly am unconcerned with attracting drive-by interest from the general public. What if I want to do community-building amongst my geographical neighbors? I actively want to discourage participation from people not in that demographic.
The rules of the game are very different when one isn't building a public community. Frankly, "closed" or "private" communities are a lot more "community-like", because they aren't a bunch of strangers, and often have shared resources and projects.
That is one crucial thing which he failed to mention at all: one of the reasons that Open Source project-based communities are so strong is that the members aren't just shooting the breeze, they actually have shared interests in a common good and project (e.g. the code they are working on). It is not totally necessary for a community to have a shared work, but it is a real boost.
Nor, for that matter does he differentiate between a vital "community site" and a vital "community". Consider all the argument about whether /. is a community. Clearly /. is a vital community site with an enormous amount of traffic. But it's not really much of a community in that, I think it is fair to say, most people here are unconcerned with the day-to-day lives of the other people here.
A big rolicking on-going discussion does not a community make. It's one part of the whole, and it may be the foundation on which a community can bloom, but a community is more than conversation.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
...than that? I agree that many online communities exist for members to learn from each other. Even online gaming society members learn more about playing their favourite games. And slashdot is always very educational (well, it's taught me a lesson I won't forget in a hurry) ;)
That's not to say they're just there for learning though - there's always the humans behind the posts who make it a community and not just an impersonal forum. Not being too slushy about it all, people join up and post replies and argue and make up and other people join in and argue and make up and argue again and... ...growth, evolution, with the occassional flame war thrown in for good measure.
Online communities exist as outgrowths of real world communities but are based more on similar interests that similar geographical location. It's all very subjective but all the features we see in face to face interactions are there lurking below the surface.
Sometimes being civilised is just another way of saying "Yeah, I know what you're saying." Or something.
If you can't think of something nice to say then don't say anything at all. No, REALLY.
As the builder of towerofbabel.com , I think the most fascinating thing about building an online community is that it's like throwing a party and not knowing who is on the invite list, let alone who is going to show up. It completely short circuits every societally sanctioned way of meeting people and really cuts to the chase when you're looking for interesting and intelligent conversation. Of course it helps if you have a wealth of good content as a base for the community. It just goes to reiterate the quote that a neighbor is not a geographic term, it's a moral term.
My name is Carlos Montoya. You share files of my music. Prepare to die.
Get a story posted on slashdot with a link to your site. Instant community!
Oh speaking of... MyGeekdom.com. There! Now maybe I'll get some community too.
The Blender Community ROCKS!! It gathered itself up by the bootstraps and saved one outrageously cool 3D render engine!
Check out www.blender.org and www.blender3d.com
We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. - HST
It's very hard to be objective in evaluating your own work. That's why there are so many editors in the world.
Now, you say "It was filled with evidence and fact, not speculation and conjure", but I've heard similar claims more often than I can care to admit. The truth is, nine times out of ten it was an opinion piece, where the "facts" were largely interpretations of fact, or worse yet interpretations of "facts" that were themselves a matter of opinion. I mean, let's face it, you describe the writeup like so: "It was a fact piece about how G. W. Bush is the rightful president". That's an opinion piece, okay?
If you're writing about a controversial topic, you've got an ethical obligation (IMHO, anyhow) to lean pretty far over backward in trying to be fair and objective.
So: You say it was deleted "because the editor... didn't agree with me", but naturally you have no hard reason to believe that. The editor probably gave you a reasonable explanation similar to what I just gave you above. Rather than listen, you just decided that it's easier to assume that he's evil than to accept the possibility that your writeup might have had shortcomings. You decided to blame your failings on somebody else's evil schemes (sounds a lot like a certain Democratic candidate who lost an election in Florida, eh?). You are offering your opinion about his motivation as an alleged "fact", which sheds an unwelcome light on your claims w/r/t the Bush writeup.
It's just as well you left E2, if all you've got to contribute is (frequently rather paranoid) opinions which you believe to be "fact".
Uhh... something like that...
I've been using wikis for a couple of years now and they are a great way to have multiple people contribute information and organize it.
/. scroll of the end of the page and despite their searchability, the information disappears into "desuetude".)
Its the least amount of code required to maintain a database, present it, interact with it, search and organize it in a network of inter-linked web content.
Blogs (like
Wikis are fundamentally meant to be more persistent by their nature.
They are more organized and any item can (and should,) be reviewed, expanded, ammended and tweaked into shape by anyone in the community who wants to have input.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Here is an update on this the post the covers all questionable points
Moderation Totals: Insightful=1, Interesting=1, Informative=1, Overrated=1, Total=4.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I currently have to implement a DotLRN (.lrn) site which is based on OpenACS.
But anyway, OpenACS is the reworked version of ACS (which stands for 'Asomething' Community System) that was written for Oracle and AOLserver.
OpenACS is written in TCL, specifically for PostgreSQL and AOLserver.
I don't like TCL that much, but at least it works
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Heh heh heh...
Those brainless parasites will bitch about anything. Fuck 'em. It's not worth it.