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 this one."
chromatic++. Er, I mean, +1, Insightful. Wait, where am I anyway?
Another thing to consider is how far "cross-pollination" of community sites is simplified because of the similarity of the UI. (Usually because of a common codebase: think E2 and Perl Monks, use Perl and Slashdot.) It may attract you to a site, although it probably won't keep you there: the community dynamic can be very different even when the UI is similar. For example, both use Perl and Slashdot are on Slash, but the similarity pretty much ends there. (Thank goodness
Re:Insightful writeup
russell on 2002-10-28T16:31:00
I think Everything is more chaotic than Slash, from the maintainer's perspective. I don't think using Everything would be suitable for a news site, but it seems to work well for community sites like E2 and Perl Monks.
As for the Chatterbox, I don't think Use Perl is updated often enough for people to be hitting it enough to maintain chatter. I think the reason why it works on E2 is because people are busy working their way between nodes and can follow vaguely what's going on in the Chatterbox. I hit Use Perl once a day, so that wouldn't work for me.
All idle speculation, of course.
