Community Guy – Jake McKee

10 Questions with Patrick O’Keefe, Moderation Guru & Author

My friend Patrick has written a great book about managing online forum communities. I’ve talked about him and his book quite a bit lately so I wanted to grab him for a 10 questions interview.

You can find out more about the book at his site or his blog. You can also see him in action.
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1. You clearly have a fascination with forum management. How come? (and how did the book come out of this)

I’ve been managing online forums for about eight years. It started with the site I placed on the first domain name that I ever registered – iFroggy.com. I really liked Yahoo! and I still do and, at that time, I tried to create my own Yahoo!, basically. I did as many things as I could, had as many content sections as I was able. And, in developing the site, it seemed like a natural progression to have forums so that people could not just read the site, but also interact with the people that wrote it as well as one another. Those were my first forums.

From there, I have launched a number of different forums and it’s something that I’m passionate about. I don’t know if I can pinpoint why, exactly. It’s something that I got into, enjoyed and kept doing. And here we are, eight years later.

I’m also a writer, having written content, articles and editorials online for years and years. Putting the two passions together, I decided to try to write a book on the subject. At first, I wasn’t sure if I could. I began by taking notes, detailing things I could talk about. I would literally be managing my forums and then think, “hey, that’s interesting, I should talk about that” and then I’d write it down. Eventually, that list of notes got pretty long. I organized them into chapters and wrote them out.

2. If someone comes to you and says theyíd like to start a community, how would you determine if a forum is a smart choice?

Forums are a good choice for anyone who wants to encourage people to interact with one another directly, to bring up the topics they’d like to bring up and to do things without necessarily interacting with the people who own the site. Whereas the new topics on blogs are generally controlled by one writer or a team of writers, anyone who registers can generally create a topic on forums. This allows for more free and rapidly progressing discussion, assistance and interaction.

3. Where do forums fit into this whole wave of blogs and social networking and sites like MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Utterz and the rest?

A friend of mine and yours, Lee LeFever, provided advance praise for the book. In it, he said that “online forums make up the very foundation of the social web.” I think that’s a good way to put it. But, at the same time, forums are also very current. When you are talking about a buzz brand right now like a MySpace or a Facebook or a YouTube, the functionality of forums – whether in full or in part – is a part of the functionality of these websites.

This question relates to another question I have been asked a few times, which is something along the lines of “what is the future of forums?” What changes in forums is the features and innovation – what will stay the same is the interaction. It’s hard for me to picture a time when we won’t want to discuss something, get help or better ourselves by interacting with someone else in a text based manner online. So, it’s hard for me to picture a time when forums will not have a place.

4. How do you define “Community Management”? How do see yourself fitting into that definition?

Community management is… er… managing all aspects of the community. Seriously, to get into detail a bit, there are many different areas of management when it comes to forums and communities. You have to manage people. This includes your members, but also your staff. Being in public, being a good example for others to follow – holding yourself to a higher standard. I believe in leading by example in every definition. I converse on my forums in a way that I’d like to see members conversing. I act as a staff member in a way I’d want my staff members to act.

Drafting and enforcing guidelines is a part of management. Removing posts, contacting members and informing them as to what went wrong. Answering questions from members and staff. Making decisions when decisions must be made. Dealing with threats to the community. Being comfortable with being looked at as the bad guy and making decisions that make some people detest you. Not having to be popular and being willing to share credit, issue praise and thank people for being a part of the community. I feel it important for communities to have vision and to have goals and to ensure that everything that they do places them in a better position to accomplish these. And that means that not everyone will like you.

5. What value do you see in building a robust moderation plan? What does such a plan include?

A system of moderation is vital to a community with a focus, with goals, with vision. Whatever your community is, whatever it does – chances are that there is some content you don’t want to allow. And, yet, people will post this content anyway, even if you have guidelines forbidding it. That’s life. But, that’s also why you need to have a manner in which these posts are handled. So that things stay on track and that you are heading in the desired direction.

There’s a system I talk about a lot and I like it because it’s simple, it works and any forum software will allow you to do it. There are four steps to it. The first part is recognizing a violation. That’s self explanatory. Second, we have removal of said violation. I have a private, staff member only forum called the “Trash Bin”. This is where we move any post that violates our guidelines. We don’t edit posts as it makes for sloppy documentation, harder mistake correction and moderators being looked at as proofreaders, among other things. Having a post, untouched, as the poster made it with their IP and other data attached is a very valuable piece of documentation.

The third part of it is documenting the violation. We have a second private, staff member only forum we call “Problem Users”. In this forum, every member we have ever had to contact or take any sort of action in regard to has a thread. The thread is titled with the user’s exact username. And then anything related to that member is added as a reply. This can range from things that aren’t inherently bad, like username changes, to things that are, like disrespectful and inappropriate comments. I also document any private message or e-mail conversation I have with a member that is in any way notable. This helps to ensure that me and my staff are always on the same page, even when I have to make a decision based on something that the member may not have done in the public forums.

Documenting a violation like vulgar language would mean including a link to the removed post in the Trash Bin and then mentioning what was wrong with it (”Vulgar”) and the action that was taken (most commonly “PM sent” for private message sent, but sometimes “Banned”). This is followed by a quote of the post, highlighting the violation.

Finally, we have the actual action. If a member is to be contacted via private message, we have a system of contact templates which are pre-written template messages that can be made to fit most every violation that can be made on our forums. This helps ensure consistent, respectful communication from staff member to staff member.

This system can be adapted into other feature sets, as well, of course. But, it must be comprehensive, permanent, searchable and you must be able to tell when there is new activity, so that it can be reviewed.

6. How do you select your moderators on your forums?

Generally, moderators are selected from the memberbase of the forums. You want your moderators to be your ideal members. People who are already contributing in a kind and helpful fashion. People who are already participating in a way that you encourage in your user guidelines. It’s imperative that your staff members be great examples of your community that everyone can follow. There are definitely private aspects to being a moderator, like removing posts, but the public aspects are just as important.

When we identify someone we want to promote, we contact them and let them know how much we appreciate their contributions and demeanor and, because of that, we’d like to invite them to join the staff. I include a copy of the staff guidelines as well as any requirements, so that they know up front what is to be expected. I also encourage them to ask questions.

With a new community, where I may not have an established base of members, I will try to find staff members from people that I believe to be reliable and also have an interest in the subject that the community is based around.

7. Many business people don’t like the idea of turning away users from a forum, even if those users are not a positive influence. How do you approach this issue?

I believe that, as an administrator or staff, you are really charged with molding a culture or an environment on your community. What that is, you will decide. And how you manage your forums will have a direct impact on what your atmosphere is like. I have specific ideas in mind for my communities. My communities are based very firmly upon respect to an extreme. We also try to be family and work friendly as much as we can be within our subject matter. Posts that violate our guidelines will be removed. People that show a lack of respect for our community, guidelines and staff will be prevented from accessing the forums.

I have a saying. I don’t ban people – people ban themselves. I mean that – people make me ban them. I don’t want to, but I have to, in order to maintain the respect and the environment on my community. I don’t approach things from the “I want as much traffic” or “I want as many posts as possible” perspective. I do want as much traffic as I can get with a qualifier. That qualifier being that we maintain a certain level of quality in our environment. I’ve banned the top poster on my forums before. And I’ll do it again – if I have to. I don’t believe in being held hostage by veteran members just because they are veteran members. Again, I don’t want to have to prevent anyone from accessing the site – but, our guidelines will be enforced and our atmosphere will be preserved.

8. What are the most difficult issues you have to deal with as a moderator?

As a moderator, a lot of the things I do (and we do) are down to a process. Violations are, for the most part, cut and dry. What’s vulgar is vulgar, what’s advertising is advertising. It’s not fun to tell otherwise great members that they did something wrong, but it has to be done. There are some issues that are borderline and, of course, those decisions aren’t always fun to make. Removing posts isn’t something I enjoy – and yet, it’s something I have to do. I recognize what our responsibilities are and ensure that they are fulfilled, even if criticism awaits.

9. In the book, you talk about a lot of real, specific and sometimes funny situations youíve had to deal with. What is a recent funny story that you can share?

There is this community that is based around a similar subject to one of mine. The person behind it, quite a while ago, signed up and created a thread to mention it on my forums. This was removed, of course. Not that big a deal. But, after that, a staffer from the site signed up, made 25 junk posts (so that they could use our private message system) and then PM spammed a bunch of my members advertising the site. I’ve blocked the site from being mentioned on my community.

I don’t know that the guy behind the site is inherently bad – just possibly bad at managing forums or at trusting certain people. The forums are a cesspool of slime balls who have been banned from my site and, as such, hold me in a certain, special regard. Anyway, the person behind the site recently contacted me, asking if he could advertise on my site. That’s not gonna happen. Worse yet, when I took a look, they’d stolen our rank images! And then when I requested they be removed, he made his forums private! A DMCA notice waiting to happen. Some people just don’t get it.

10. Do you have any parting words or something else that youíd like to share?

One thing I would like to say about the book is that it is based, very firmly and completely on real life experience. These aren’t hypothetical or made up things I am talking about – these are real things that I have done. Things that I have seen and how I have dealt with them. I manage my communities everyday and what I talk about in the book is what I am doing, day in and day out, on my forums. I really feel this is one of the book’s biggest benefits – if not it’s biggest. This is real stuff.

10 Questions with Alaina Browne of SeriousEats.com

A couple years back, I had the pleasure of working on a project with Alaina Browne when she was with Mule Design. It was a lot of fun, so you can imagine how pleased I was to find out that she was married to my internet friend, Anil Dash. It’s a small damn world in this industry!

Alaina is now the General Manager of SeriousEats.com, a very cool site dedicated to….well, read on for the details!

1. Who are you and what is Serious Eats?
I’m Alaina Browne, General Manager of Serious Eats. Serious Eats is a website focused on celebrating and sharing food enthusiasm through blogs and online community. Our mantra is “passionate, discerning, inclusive”.

2. The site has blended traditional content with blog style and format. Why not create a more “traditional” cooking site?
I think the simplest answer is because we’re a bunch a people who love to eat, so we’ve created a site that’s about that — eating and our food enthusiasm. What we’re doing is surprisingly unique. There are plenty of recipe/cooking sites (Epicurious.com, RecipeZaar.com), and dining sites (Yelp.com, Eater.com), but few that break out beyond those niches the way we do to cover everything that’s delicious, important, and fun in food.

3. The front page doesn’t display full articles for every post – several are shown just as titles and links to comment. How does this editorial process work?
We call these short posts “quick bites” and they’re items we run across during the course of the day that we think are worth sharing with our readers, and don’t involve additional editorial comment from us. In terms of how something becomes a “quick bite”, we have a project in Basecamp where everyone on the editorial team posts, shares, and vets links. It’s not the ideal tool for the task, but it works!

4. When I look at the About Us page, I see that most, if not all of the staff are food bloggers in their own right. How does this passion affect the outcome of the Serious Eats site? (Both good and bad)
I think our combined passion is what drives our success. We’re doing what we love, and it shows. I think it also gives Serious Eats a very conversational (as opposed to hierarchical) feel that’s makes people want to stick around. The only negative is that some traditional print media in the space is reticent to give us coverage because they view us as competition, and executing and succeeding in the online space in a way that they’ve not been able to.

5. Your site is highly niche, something that tends to scare many people who think that advertising models only work within the context of “include everybody!” concepts. How would you address that concern?
I think it actually works to our advantage because the opportunities in our niche, the online food space, are tremendous. And even within the food category, there are niches within niches. We’ve partnered with Scripps Networks (Food Network’s parent company) to represent our advertising inventory. We bring them an audience that they don’t reach
through Foodnetwork.com, and we’re able to take advantage of the existing relationships they’ve developed with advertisers we want to connect with.

And it seems to work for other sites in this space — Allrecipes.com was acquired by Reader’s Digest for $66 million, and Scripps bought Recipezaar.com for ~$25 million.

6. You have a somewhat unique take on “conversation” from users of the site, implementing a user driven conversation through blog-like message posting rather than traditional message forums. Why the twist?
A couple reasons. Managing multiple back end platforms is a headache, and many forums are overbuilt with features — they’re built for geeks, by geeks. One of the hardest parts of starting a community is making it feel like a community, even if it is a small one. The architecture of traditional message forums makes for a space that is intimidatingly empty until it’s not. Our system of blog-like messaging gave it in a more intimate feel, allowed the the community and conversation to grow organically, just as it would in the real world at a cocktail or dinner party.

7. Tell us a bit about how your community moderation and management process works. In a niche community, do you see less need for content moderation?
Our biggest tool for community management and moderation is prohibiting anonymous commenting by requiring commenters to register. It’s a very low barrier to participation that stops most drive-by commenters — folks who just show up for a pile on. I think the tone of the site (keeping in mind “passionate, discerning, inclusive”) is more responsible for the need for very little moderation than the niche.

8. How how the use of an open source platform like Movable Type helped (and hindered) your site development?
Choosing Movable Type as our publishing platform was the primary reason we were able to meet our launch deadline. And as bloggers familiar with the platform, we were even further inclined toward MT. Post launch, it’s been easy for us to add new features and functionality thanks to MT’s plug-in architecture and the smart folks at Apperceptive. There’s a whole range of content management solutions out there and none of them are perfect — they all come with their own
headaches, it’s a matter of choosing which flavor of headache you can live with.

9. What do you not see Serious Eats users doing much that you’d love them to use more often? What feature(s) would you just love to implement, if not for those pesky technology/time/budget limits?
I’d love to see our members and readers use their profile pages more! They’re a great way to share a little bit more about yourself with others, and to check out someone else’s latest posts and comments.

10. Any parting words, or new upcoming features you’d like to share?
What’s upcoming is more and more people are joining the site and sharing their stories. That’s the most fun part of my job — watching as people find their way to our community and discover that Serious Eats is full of other folks just like them, and soon enough they’re a regular. It’s really satisfying to be a part of that process.

As far as new features? More deliciousness!

10 Questions with Andrew Mason of ThePoint.com

If you haven’t seen the (relatively) new site, The Point take a swing by. The concept is extremely interesting (more on that below), but I’ve been blown away by the way they’ve designed the site. A social designer like myself gets all giddy when feature after hoped-for feature is there, creating a fantastic user experience. I’ll be writing more about the site design soon, but in the mean time, Andrew Mason was kind enough to kick on with the ongoing 10 Questions series. Thanks, Andrew!

(By the way, The Point is looking for a Community Manager. Check out the listing on the Community Guy Jobs Board)

The Point is a web site for organizing group actions. We help people congregate around the issues they care about and combine forces to make things happen. Campaigns (group actions) on The Point are all based on the “tipping point” model – participants take action to solve their problem, but only once a critical mass of people have committed such that the combined force will “tip” the issue. The Point helps you know in advance whether your participation will make a difference.

2. What’s the difference between Problems vs. Campaigns?

Campaigns are designed around actually doing something. When someone creates a campaign, (s)he specifies an action to be taken by the people who join. Once the campaign reaches its tipping point, everyone is expected to do that thing, whether it’s showing up somewhere, donating money, or changing your behavior somehow. The idea is that campaigns, once they tip, graduate into the physical world.Problems are more like focused discussion forums. They’re for when you’re frustrated about something but unsure how to fix it, so you want to work through it with other people. Also, Problems tie together campaigns that address the same issue. For example, you could look at a “Global Warming” problem to see all the campaigns on the site that are addressing global warming.

3. While not at all difficult, the function of the site seems a bit complex at first. Do you find that people who are upset enough, or want something to change or happen bad enough are more inclined to spend a little more time building something to address that?

Most people don’t have trouble understanding the concept, but it can be tough to immediately think of a campaign that addresses a problem you’re dealing with at that moment. I think this is generally due to the (understandable) atrophy of collective action as a tactic for getting things done. I say it’s understandable because collective action has inherent problems that lead to cumbersome and unpredictable results. People don’t do it because, so often, it doesn’t work. But the Internet changes a lot of the underlying conditions that caused us to discount collective action in the first place. It’s our great challenge to tease people’s imaginations into dreaming up what’s possible in a world where collective action works, and you can get a disparate collection of people together to take an action designed to realize a shared goal.

Here’s the dynamic we’ve been observing. People see The Point, they get the way it works, think it’s cool, and then go on with their lives. But then something pops up, a frustrating problem that they can’t address alone, and The Point pops into their mind as a tool that’s uniquely appropriate for attacking the issue. So they come back and start or join a campaign. While a lot of our time early one was spent identifying current events where The Point could be useful and then finding people to start campaigns, we’re now seeing those campaigns pop up organically, before we even know about the issue. That’s been nice.

As to whether we think that people are upset enough, the only person that needs to really do much is the campaign creator, and then other people just need to join. The whole idea of The Point is to reduce the time required to care about something by only asking people to act once the conditions exist for action to matter. For me at least, that’s a lot more attractive than the alternatives — a petition or a rally — where you have no idea what you’re going to accomplish. The Point is trying use the Web to make group action as efficient and predictable as Netflix makes renting movies.

4. It seems like content moderation would be crucial on a site built around complaints and problems. How do you address this issue?

First, I wouldn’t say we’re build around complaints and problems. We’re build around group action. Anything that takes a bunch of people to get done, you can make it happen with The Point. It just so happens that complaints and problems often require a bunch of people to solve, but so does funding the re-beautification of your neighborhood park, or getting a group discount at your gym.

That said, your question is still important. We have a staff that censors the blatantly obscene. We have plans to involve our user community in policing the site, as well as a censor.thepoint.com sub-site where the curious can review and pass judgment upon our manifestations of absolute power.

5. How does your team handle community management functions? Do you have a full-time community manager?

We do. We have one guy that works with campaign creators, helping them fine-tune their campaigns and get the word out. We have another guy that scours the Web for things that would work great on The Point and encourages people to start campaigns. And I do a fair deal of both.

Community management can be really time consuming for us. Sometimes, we spend several hours a day working with a single campaign organizer. It’s not just about telling people how to use Facebook and Digg to attract people to their campaign, we have to help them design it too, which often requires an understanding of the issue they’re trying to address. For example, say you’re upset that a chemical company is polluting your lake. What’s a group action that will force that chemical company to stop? You have to find out who buys their products, and if they’re upset enough to take action. If not, you have to find out who has influence over the buyers, and see if the situation upsets them. And so on. Once you find a constituency, you have to decide on an action they would be willing to take, and how many of them it will take to offset the benefit of polluting the lake.

Some campaigns are really straight forward, but others require a lot of thought to do right. That, again, is why we have the Problems section — for people to call on each other’s expertise to work through these questions.

6. Since it’s fairly simple to join a new campaign, how do you ensure members take the joining of a campaign seriously?

For campaigns that raise money, it’s easy — we take your credit card information up front, we just don’t charge you until the tipping point is reached. The answer is more interesting when it comes to the campaigns that ask people to do something.

Through the language on the site, we try and make it clear that people are committing to do something, and if they are asked to take action, it is only because it is necessary to bring about change. We also send people monthly reminders of their commitments, and make it really easy for people to resign from a campaign if for whatever reason they no longer want to participate.

To some extent, we’re starting with the assumption that people are perfectly reliable and will do exactly what they say they’re going to do. I think that the healthiest communities start out by assuming the best of their users, and then only shorten the leash where it’s proven necessary. Once we start getting a sense for how people are following through on their commitments to action, we have a lot of ideas on how we can create fun incentives for people to follow through and stay engaged.

Also, many campaigns are self-enforcing in the sense that the tipping action is something they’d like to do, but they can’t for some reason. These are the “safety through numbers” situations, i.e. if a few people take the action, those people lose big time, but if you get enough people, everyone wins. For example, say your job has a business casual dress code. If you and you alone wear jeans, you’ll be punished, you lose, it’s not worth it. But if everyone started wearing jeans on the same day, everyone wins. So if this were organized through a campaign on The Point (”we will start wearing jeans to work if X people join”), you’ll take it seriously because wearing jeans is your preferred state. The persistence of policies like “business casual” relies on an inability to coordinate hairpin changes in group behavior. With The Point, you can’t rely on that inability anymore.

7. The Point has a fairly robust invitation and sharing process to help drive awareness of a specific campaign. Are users putting these tools to work? What’s your dream scenario for how users would build support for their campaign?

Yeah, people have been sending invitations. We’ve also seen a lot of people embedding campaign widgets in their web pages. But there’s so much more we want to do. For example, we’re in the process of changing the way you sign up for your first campaign. Right now, you have to create an account first, and then wait for a verification email — it’s a pain. We’re making it a seamless, one step process. We’re also encouraging people to make use of sites like Digg, and we’ve just released a cool Facebook application called “Ultimatums.”

As for the dream scenario: As much as The Point can be a self-contained community, we really see ourselves as a tool that enhances existing communities. So if you’re upset about something, chances are, there’s already a place on the Web where people are talking about it. The problem is, there’s no way for them to bottle that frustration and release it once enough builds up to force change. We want to see our users inject our tools in those places. We want campaign widgets to be like dream catchers, sprinkled in communities all over the Web. Except, instead of catching dreams, they’re catching pissed off people. We register their pissed-offedness, and send them on their merry ways. And then once the bottle fills up, we shoot the a note saying, “Hey! There’s enough of you to fix the problem! Do what you said you’re going to do and you’ll have your solution!”

8. When I’m looking at a particular target, say AT&T, I can set my relationship to the target (in my case, I’m a customer of AT&T). Why is this important? How do you deal with people saying they’re an employee when they’re not?

Right now, it can be used to find other people who share your relationship — e.g. you want to find other customers of AT&T because you’re launching a campaign to get them to stop proverbially killing kittens and you think other AT&T customers would be interested in it.

But we have embarrassingly grandiose ideas about what this information could enable. I imagine a tool like The Point acting as a market system for corporate policy decisions. Imagine, you come to The Point, and the first thing you do is enter all the companies you interact with somehow. Who makes your computer? Your shoes? Your toothpaste? Who cuts your hair? Not so we can “deliver you a more targeted advertising experience,” which is about as compelling as eating razor blades, but so we can tell you what those companies are doing, and give you a direct path to influence corporate policy. We have a “supply chain” feature that maps the relationship between different companies. So, for example, logging company X sells to paper mill Y which sells to consumer-accessible stationery store Z. You tell The Point which companies you interact with directly, and we’ll tell you all the ones you’re supporting indirectly.

With that information, we can tell you whenever a company that you support institutes a new policy. Company A has changed their return policy. Company B donated is lobbying for something. Company C is logging rain forests. Never heard of company C? Well, they sell to company X, who sells to paper mill Y who sells to stationery store Z, where you buy your paper. Are you interested in joining a campaign to end Z’s relationship with Y?

When effectively aggregated, the consumer’s purchasing power is ultimate power. The Point could be a tool for individuals to, in effect, regulate corporate policy by wielding their pocketbooks. No need for government. This is true democracy, this is what America’s all about! And the efficiency of the process, I think, is a win for individuals and companies alike.

9. What are the tricks of the trade for making a campaign successful?

The site is young, so we’re still figuring it out. But I a few educated guesses:

Write your campaign to appeal to the lack of risk intrinsic in our model. Make sure you play up the fact that there’s nothing to lose — you won’t be asked to do anything unless enough resources have been gathered to reach your goal. A good example of this is the campaign about building a winter dome over Chicago. Do you think something like that would have raised a dime if people had to consider whether it would actually get done? All they have to think about is what it’s worth to them, and that simplification has resulted in over $200,000 being raised.

Also, use a tone that’s going to appeal to a wide variety of people. Don’t say that you think George Bush should be put in jail unless that’s the purpose of your campaign. Avoid superfluous alienation.

Finally, the campaigns that have had the most success are the ones that have gotten traction in existing communities. Post links in the places where people already care about the issue, and you’ll have greater success.

10. What do you not see The Point users doing much that you’d love them to use more often? What feature(s) would you just love to implement, if not for those pesky technology limits?

I’ve talked about some of the features above, and there are a lot more like them. The toughest thing for us to answer is, “how much of a learning curve will people tolerate?” We could build an extremely robust system for decision making and campaign governance, but if it gets complex, it won’t be worth investing the time to learn for many people. We struggle with that every day.

10 Questions with Michael Broukhim

I’ve been having a great time on a new(ish) site, Why08.org where you can identify yourself with a candidate and engage in some rousing political discussion surrounding that choice. The site is fun, and designed very smart.

Before the holiday break, I exchanged emails with site creator Michael Boukhim and, of course, had to hit him up for the Community Guy 10 Questions parade!

We’ve used the phrase “conversation community” to discuss what we’re doing because we’re clearly something different than your traditional message board, but “social network” isn’t quite an apt description either. We like to see ourselves as part of a growing trend of “social publishing” sites — like Tumblr or Twitter — which are primarily mediums for expression, but also have strong built in community functionality.

2. You mention on the site that you wanted a better way to talk about politics. Has the site delivered on that desire?
I think so. There are tons of sites out there where you can talk about politics, but most of them have an ideological slant or they draw on a relatively narrow constituency. We wanted Why08 to be a non-partisan site designed for partisans of all sorts to hash out their differences. When people disagree you get a much more interesting and lively discussion, than when they don’t.

We’ve seen quite a bit of engagement between supporters of different candidates, especially among the big pools of Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul supporters. We think that’s a good thing, and it’s something we’re looking to build on.

3. From the various color schemes to the bobble head candidate images, design seems to play a big role in the tone of the site. Can you tell us the greater hidden meaning of the bobble?

It’s a secret.

Well…if you insist…When we mocked out the site in a few different ways, we found that users were drawn to the images of the candidates. Something about big heads ignites opinions; so we went with them.

4. I’m struck by the tone of your site – despite having a somewhat sarcastic feel & tone, it seems to be some of the best political banter around. How do you think the sarcastic bent affects the (mostly) positive nature of the discussions? How does the specific focus of support or not support affect this?
Thanks for the compliment. In dreaming up the site, we knew it had to have a “fun” bent to it in order to succeed. At every opportunity we have to articulate a vision for the site — whether in “about” pages, emails, or interviews like these — we’ve tried to stress that we want Why08 to be a place for political discourse in all its variety, from the inane to the insightful.

Some of the best political commentary out there is made through humor. Whether it’s a sketch on Saturday Night Live or an interview on the Colbert Report, satire can be poignant. We wanted Why08 to be welcoming to the lighter side of politics as well as serious policy debate, and so far, we’re happy with the mix we’ve seen.

With respect to the focus on getting users to take positions (every post has to be associated with a “stand” – support/oppose/neutral – on a candidate), we wanted to create an organizing principle that made sense for politics. In traditional message boards, there are ‘”threads” that start up one day and die the next; we think real conversations are more fluid than that, so we use candidates and positions to structure our conversations.

5. What else do you do in order to maintain order ( i.e. moderation? User banning? Content removal?)
Yup, a little of all of that. We try to stay lite in our oversight, both because it frees our capacity to focus on improving the product and because we believe there needs to be a certain degree of latitude given in political discussions. That said, we have little tolerance for spamming and for bad language, and address those issues through filters and on a case-by-case basis.

6. I’m fascinated by the “Permanent Record” concept. Can you share what it is and how you stumbled upon the idea?
As on all sites with a great deal of user-generated content, there has to be solid mechanisms and incentives in place for bringing the best content to the forefront. It’s an area we think we can improve on a lot. Creating a “Permanent Record” for the posts that receive the most “agrees” in their category is one way we’ve found to give users quick access to a sort of “hall of fame” of Why08 posts.

Down the road, we’re going to be increasingly focused on broadening the community and making it easier for people to engage with Why08 content. As we get out there in more places and make it easier to interact with our content (through widgets, social networking apps, etc.) we hope the “Permanent Record” will be a resource for gaining a pulse of the broader internet community’s opinion on a given candidate or issue.

7. Do you think there are other political discussion sites/outlets that are doing a decent job, or are they all falling into the black hole of internet foolishness?
Sure, there are a lot of great sites out there. To take a page from Robert Putnam, we just thought there was a lot more “bonding” than “bridging” going on, and we wanted to create a community that evened out the scales a little, bringing people together — even in vehement disagreement — rather than pushing them further into their own corners. It’s just more fun that way.

8. The site is branded to last, basically, until November 2008. What happens after that point?
Alas, the brand, Why08, will have to be laid to rest by then, but the site will definitely live on. We think we have a great structure for political conversation, so we’re going to keep expanding on range of topics to talk about.

9. What do you not see Why08 users doing much that you’d love them to use more often? What feature(s) would you just love to implement, if not for those pesky technology limits?
We have to make inviting existing friends (and tracking the evolution of their political views) to the site a simpler, more appealing option. We’ve mentioned before, and we really believe that Why08 will only be as strong as its community, and in many ways it’s a “personalized community”…we want all our users to have that sense of a personalized Why08 community awaiting them. We’re growing at a tremendously fast pace, but making easier to bring others on board is a definite priority.

As for developing new features, we see Why08 as giving structure to political debate on the internet; we’d like that to be true regardless of where the user is or where the debate is taking place.

Despite ultimately being unsuccessful, we thought there was something to Edgeio’s model of bringing listings on the “edge of the net” to a central hub. The problem there seemed to be that people didn’t use their blogs for making classified listings. They do use their blogs for political (and other) opinions; we’re aiming to tap into that.

10. Any parting words, or new upcoming features you’d like to share?
By the time the New Hampshire primary rolls around, there will be a slew of new stuff to play with!

10 Questions with David Nelsen of TalkShoe.com

Time to continue the ongoing series of 10 Question interviews with great services and sites that have community as a strong component. We have several more interviews in the works, but next up we chat with David Nelsen of TalkShoe.com!

1. What is TalkShoe?
www.TalkShoe.com is a website where you can talk (and text) live with others who share your interests. For example, if you love “Grey’s Anatomy” on ABC, you can connect with others who do too. Or maybe just talk with your friends. We can this “Social Conference Calling”.

2. What prompted you to create this tool?
So many people are becoming part of groups online. I thought it would be really cool if these groups could actually talk live. With TalkShoe, up to 300 people can get on the phone together. It sounds like chaos, but we’ve built it in a way that works!

3. TalkShoe seems to be aimed, in no small part, at helping online-only content producers (bloggers, vbloggers, podcasters, webcomic artists, etc.) go from small and static into big and dynamic. Did people think you were crazy for targeting an audience that (seemingly) “doesn’t make much money”?
To use a video analogy, you can be ABC television or you can be YouTube. Both are valid businesses, but I like YouTube better because it’s video entertainment democracy — anybody can do it. In many ways, TalkShoe is like an audio version of YouTube. Our users generate all of the content on the site. They do amazing things that we would never have thought of ourselves.

4. I assume that VOIP is the rockstar of this project; without it, would you be able to cover the hard costs?
I’ll rephrase it this way: Free calling is the rock star. Social conference calling is going mainstream because people can now call anywhere for free — with Voice over IP (VoIP) from their computer, with free night and weekend minutes on their cell phone, or with flat rate unlimited calling from their home phone. With TalkShoe’s “ShoePhone” feature, people can join a TalkShoe call from anywhere on the planet for free. So now you can talk to Grey’s Anatomy fans in Australia too.

5. Speaking of costs… usage is free, and has been for a while. Talk to us about the future plans for keeping the lights on.
TalkShoe makes money in two ways. Even though people are calling in on Skype, or Vonage, or free cell phone minutes, TalkShoe and our partners earn a few cents per minute for every caller from the long distance companies because of an FCC rule. In addition, most of the calls on TalkShoe are recorded (at the option of the originator). We place short audio ads at the beginning of these recordings (like on the radio) and earn a few cents every time someone listens in the future.

6. Do you see any patterns, or gut feel about how audiences are growing?
We see the fastest growth when existing online groups in MySpace, FaceBook, Ning, Yahoo Groups, etc., use TalkShoe to start talking to each other. Typically, they pick a specific day and time and talk for about an hour every week. Of course with tens of thousands of live participants, there’s every pattern you can imagine.

7. I’m a huge PVP fan (www.pvponline), and have followed some of their shows which are great fun. What’s the effect, in your view, of combining a TalkShoe show with their own Web site?
The fans of PVP are a perfect example of an online group. TalkShoe allows them to connect with Scott Kurtz and the rest of the PVP team, and with each other.

8. What do you not see TalkShoe users doing much that you’d love them to use more often?
Each month we see 1,000,000 people listen to social conference call recordings (yes, there’s lots of interesting content here) while fewer than 50,000 (<5%) actually participate live. I’d like to see the 95% that have not done so, yet, actually call in. I think they’d find it to be a fun and satisfying experience to really connect with other people. Voice is a lot different than text. It’s a way to turn your online buddies into real friends.

9. What feature(s) would you just love to implement, if not for those pesky technology limits?
I wish we could just do everything sooner. We’ve now built everything that we first imagined when we started TalkShoe in 2005. But users have suggested literally hundreds of new features. If only there were steroids for software engineers — I’d be a major pusher.

10. Any parting words, or new upcoming features you’d like to share?
Every day we’re working to make TalkShoe simpler. In January, we’ll launch a new version of TalkShoe Live (our voice + text chat environment that’s used to run and manage calls) that works right out of the box. You can come to talkshoe.com and just immediately jump in to any interesting call — no sign-up or download required. And starting your own call with your friends will be much simpler too. And free as always!

10 Questions: Gregg Brockway from TripIt.com

I’ve been playing with, and fascinated by the new travel site, TripIt.com for a while now. It’s helping me wrangle my large collection of travel itineraries, mostly via email (rather than mass input in a Web form). I reached out to Gregg Brockway, co-founder and president of TripIt and he was nice enough to answer a few questions:

1. Tell me about TripIt – what does it do, who’s it for, and why is it cool?
TripIt was started to make travel easier by helping travelers organize their travel plans and stay connected to their friends and colleagues. It’s cool because it’s incredibly easy and does much of the work automatically. You just forward all your travel confirmation emails to plans@tripit.com and TripIt automatically creates a master travel itinerary with your bookings plus maps, weather and more.

2. Travel is an interesting space. It feels like there’s nothing more to innovate for the amount of activity we see in the space, yet there has been little innovation for years. What interested the team in going after a market like this?
Although there are some very big companies in the online travel world, that doesn’t mean there isn’t any room left to innovate.  I’ve been part of this evolving industry since 1999 when I co-founded Hotwire and the majority of our team has online travel experience.  Travel is now the largest e-commerce category, but you won’t find many people saying it’s easy to plan and book a trip.  On the contrary, organizing a trip is confusing and time-consuming for many travelers, and that’s what we’re trying to address. We don’t care where travelers book, we just help them organize their travel plans.  Until I hear travelers saying travel is easy, I think there is plenty of room for disruptive innovation.

3. How do you find a balance between making travel and travel planning easier, and also providing appropriate rich content around that travel and travel planning?
I can’t envision a time when there will be a “one stop shop” for all things travel.  Our focus is helping people organize their travel plans regardless of where they choose to research or book their trip.  We are developing foundational tools and service that can help you regardless of what type of trip you are taking, business or leisure, solo or group, budget or luxury.  We’ll let our users tell us how much content they want us to provide, how much they want to get from other sites and how much they want to get from each other.

4. What’s been the biggest challenge in building this service?
Keeping it simple and focusing on what people really need.

5. From the way the site focuses on the email-to-site function, I’m guessing you’re building and positioning much of the experience around this function? Why do think that so few web services have taken advantage of email in this way?
Yes, the TripIt user experience is part-email, part-web site which I think is one of our core strengths and seems to be working very well. It’s certainly more challenging to develop in this hybrid model, but ultimately we think better for busy travelers. There is another “part” to what we’re doing which is to push our service beyond the browser and make the information in TripIt available to users in the applications and formats they user most.  Some early examples of this are how we support iCalendar format to you can see your TripIt information in your Google calendar or Outlook 2007 as well as our new TripIt To Me mobile service.  You will see more coming along these lines.

6. We’ve seen several attempts to “socialize” the travel process, yet nothing has really kicked into mass usage mode. Why do you think that is?
Most travel social networks focus on sharing trip experiences and advice, but that can be time consuming work for many people. With our TripIt Friends network, we’re focusing on really practical and useful stuff that’s easy for anyone to participate in. For example, we make it easy to share travel info with your spouse, or see where all your friends and colleagues are traveling at any time. I guess you could say that our social network is focused more on utility than entertainment.

7. How well are you being “accepted” by the big guns of the industry, players you want to slurp data easily in order to power your site?
Because travelers send us their information directly, we’re not dependent on industry partnerships for information.  That isn’t to say we’re not interested, but having done this before, we know we’ll be old and grey before we as a start-up could move the big industry players.  Behind TripIt is a sophisticated technology that we’ve named the Itinerator that is able to understand email from nearly 80 of the top travel sites.  We’re adding more as we see interest from our travelers.  We’re very focused on being an open platform that works no matter where you book.  Going forward, there are lots of interesting partnership opportunities for TripIt to support the industry “big guns.”

8. TripIt uses connections to other web resources such as Flickr and (my new favorite site) SeatGuru. Do you ever worry about building your business in conjunction with services and APIs that could possibly change or disappear at a moment’s notice?
The strength of TripIt is being an open platform, both for supporting travel websites and other website resources. We’ve designed this support using standards that enable us to quickly add and modify the websites that we access. So we can adapt very quickly to new resources that our users want to see in their itineraries, like SeatGuru which is one of our favorites too.  With so many great resources available in travel, we don’t feel overly dependent on any one source.

9. Every Web app has it’s hidden gems, or under-utilized features… what are they for TripIt?
There are some cool features in the Itinerary that are quite useful, like checking in for flights, adding maps/directions, etc. and the power of TripIt Friends sharing and calendars if very helpful, but the hidden gem is probably TripIt To Me which we just released on 10/18. It enables a user to email TripIt a command like “get trip” and TripIt automatically emails back the info from their itinerary. It’s a simple idea but huge for road warriors or anyone in the middle of a trip who has forgotten their flight, hotel or rental car details.

10. What question does nobody ask you, but you’re dying to answer?
How much do we charge?   We’re free and plan to stay that way. We expect to make money next year by helping our users add the missing pieces to their itineraries.

10 Questions with Jonathan and Peter of Picnik.com

If you’ve read my blog, checked out my Flickr stream, or stood within 5 feet of me for more than 10 minutes you know I’m a huge fan of Picnik.com. When Tom hooked me up recently with my very own Picnik t-shirt, I thought it was time to reach out the Picnik folks and invite them to answer 10 questions. Thanks to Jonathan Sposato and Peter Roman for taking me up on the offer!
1. Tell me about Picnik… what is it? Why’d you build it?
[Jonathan] Picnik gives everyday “real people” photo editing superpowers right in a browser. its the easiest way to do anything cool to a photo whether you want to crop it, reduce red-eye, get creative and add a crazy assortment of effects, print it, save it to Flickr, or email it to someone. basically any verb you want to apply to a photo, we would like to have Picnik do. But the real beauty of Picnik is that ALL of this happens in a browser, which means there is absolutely NOTHING to download or install, and your experience bridges seamlessly with anywhere on the web where you want to GET a photo, or to STORE a photo.

Why did we build it? In general we are a team highly motivated by biting off the hard, unusual challenge. We just saw that there was a huge opportunity to do two things:

• Give people photo-editing awesomeness in a way that had never been done before. Make it easy and cheap (FINALLY)
• Create a next generation type of app that was rich and dynamic, yet runs in a browser.

2. What do you see as the “long-term vision” for Picnik?
[Jonathan] There are several facets to the longterm vision for Picnik. A big part of the long term vision is that we want Picnik to be THE single “one stop shop” tool for anyone wanting to do anything cool to their photos whether online or OFFline. I think soon I’d like to drop the distinction of “Best Online Photo Editor” and just goal ourselves to be the “Best Photo Editor” period. To do that that means ANY verb that can be applied to a photo, whether that’s edit, resize, print, save, add border, add frame, email to friends, send to cellphone, etc, people should be able to do using Picnik. Another component of this is that Picnik can also become the “nexus” or a meta front-end to anywhere where your photos are. A common internet problem right now is that a user may have pictures scattered everywhere ranging from Photobucket, Flickr, their Facebook account, and/or their hard drive. If Picnik becomes a “one stop shop” to view, organize, and action on all that, then that would be tremendously powerful. I think at the highest level Picnik is already starting to realize that vision.
We have a number of additional broad vision ideas we are developing as well. All of these relate to solving common internet photo user problems that are not being solved now.

3. I have to ask about the absolutely incredible Flash interface. With so many people going to AJAX for their tools, and after such a long history of Flash interfaces being marginal at best, what made you choose Flash?
[Peter] Flash was really a no-brainer here. Unlike AJAX, Flash lets us directly manipulate pixels in real-time, right on the client. This let us eliminate the round-trip client to server to client processing making for a true desktop experience. As for the User Interface (UI) itself, in the end, Flash is just a tool. It’s up to designers and developers to do something great with it. Luckily, we’ve got a truly kick-ass team that completely respects the role of UI and User Experience (UX).

4. What were some of the biggest challenges with building a tool like this?
[Peter] One of the biggest challenges with Picnik was bridging the gap between the desktop and web. We sit right at the nexus here, so it’s not always clear on which side to lean. Take back button support, for example. Desktop apps rarely have this concept, yet we made the decision to support it as users don’t stop to think “I’m in Flash, so I shouldn’t hit the back button.” We live on the web, so we need to be good web citizens.

Another huge thing we’ve dealt with is monitor resolution support. Usually, we’d be targetting 800×600 and up, but inside Facebook, we only get a width of 640. There’s tons of smarts inside Picnik to sense the user’s stage width and reposition/refactor elements accordingly. Working and looking good from 640×480 up to 1600×1200 and beyond is a big design and development challenge, but it’s crucial given our varied audience.

5. You’ve built your tool in no small part on APIs to connect to other services. Scary? Beneficial? Tell me about it.
[Jonathan] I’ll take this one. I think these publicly available API’s are the best thing these web services have done to enable additional value for their users. We haven’t found leveraging them to bridge with various photo services to be scary at all, but truly a lot of fun (its fun to see your own product become more and more useful!) Perhaps “where you stand is where you sit”, but from my perspective the most challenging aspect of leveraging others’ API’s has to do with the business side of it, and getting right the secret combination of words that might unlock API access on the part of the service provider. To be fair, everyone we’ve talked with has been great. But there are times when there are varying degrees of accessibility to third parties and after an initial foray into their API it may become evident that there are additional permissions that need to be granted. Nothing is inherently wrong with this but when its a small company talking to a big company sometimes that process can take many months.

[Peter] The APIs have been incredibly beneficial. A huge part of what makes Picnik fun to use is how tightly it integrates with your favorite photo service. This wouldn’t have been possible without the APIs sites like Flickr and Facebook provide. Scary? Not particularly. These sites want more traffic and more stickiness, both of which have been delivered in droves by the scores of third-party add-ons. Just look at Facebook’s meteoric rise after the launch of their platform. Why shut off the added richness apps like Picnik bring?

6. What’s been the biggest challenge in building a service like this?
[Peter] The biggest challenge has been nailing the end to end user experience, coupling both design and development to create a true desktop experience. Picnik runs right up against the boundaries of what Flash and Flex can do. Seeing how far we can take it and balancing that with a smooth user experience is an ongoing challenge.

7. Any future plans to add more social features to the site, allowing shared designs, or design galleries of great works?
[Peter] I think this will become clear very soon…

8. Looking over the About Us page of Picnik it’s clear there’s a vast array of brainpower brought to bear. Who’s the smartest and how much does the rest of the team hate them?
[Jonathan] I am pretty sure I’m the dumbest guy in the room at all times. Conversely I think my business partners Darrin and Mike are wicked smart. Peter our chief designer is certainly no slouch either : ) We’ve been very lucky because uniformly the entire team is stellar and would be A+ hires at any awesome blue chip company. But to answer your question I think I am most jealous of Peter because he’s smart AND he’s got great hair. ; )

[Peter] Ooh, tough one. I think I’d have to go with Brian, what with the Stanford degree. Honestly, it is pretty amazing working with this caliber A team. It may sound cliched, but everyone here really loves what they do and they each bring their super-genius brainpower to bear. I think it really shows in the final product.
I’d also add, as a designer, this is an absolutely thrilling environment. I’ve never had this level of development support. Everyone here is willing to go the extra mile to get the design right.

9. What’s the coolest thing you see happening online these days?
[Peter] The absolute coolest thing, the one that makes the geek in me wide-eyed with wonder, is the increasing interconnectedness of everything online. For the longest time, the web’s been almost the opposite of what it should have been — a bunch of walled gardens, islands where data sat alone. This has drastically changed in the past few years with APIs spawning just about any kind of mashup you can imagine. The fact we can make a Web app like Picnik tap into your Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket, and Picasa Web accounts all at once and pass things across all these services and then out to other ones is fantastic.

And with more and more people moving more and more of their lives online, the possibilities will continue to grow exponentially.

10. What are you dying to tell people about Picnik that no one ever asks?
[Jonathan] Thanks for asking! That there are several cool “hidden” features that people never seem to find. One of them is that you can simply pull in your pictures from ANY website. Even if you don’t have a Flickr or Facebook store of photos, just go to “Get from Web Site” and simply type in ANY URL. Picnik will pull in the photos for you to edit. Another great feature that is a bit hidden is how you can “cruise” your Facebook friends’ photo albums. If you are connected to Facebook, simply pull down the user name menu on the upper right and Picnik will produce a Rolodex of your Facebook contacts. You can simply just jump to any friend, any album and voila! you can start messing with their pics : )

Lastly, more germane to photo-editing awesomeness itself is the “effect painting” feature common to a number of the special effects. You might see a little paintbrush icon after you click on the effect like sepia for instance. Clicking on the paintbrush will open up another control that will allow you to selectively paint the effect on to just a specific area of the picture. You can also reverse the effect, and generally have a very very high degree of control over how you want the selected effect to be applied. We just added this a couple of weeks ago and I am not sure everyone knows about this : )

[Peter] I’m dying to tell people that Picnik can and does provide professional quality results. As a long-time Photoshop jockey, I’m in awe that we can do this in a browser and do it fast. We really are bringing high-end photo editing to the masses and making it easy too boot.
—

Normally, I’d wrap up the interview by exploring some of my favorite points raised. No time for that now, however… I have new features to go try out. I will share two links to extend the Picnik fun:

• Picnik Flickr Fan Group
• Picnik Addict Facebook Group

UPDATE – 10/20/7: I’ve just read that Picnik is partnering with Flickr to bring “native” image editing straight into Flickr itself. Wow!