I'm looking forward to seeing what you do with Great Dance. The idea of "a large-scale blogging platform for the dance community" is interesting to me... though I hope that you design it in a way that encourages interaction with all readers, not just active/registered participants in the site. i.e. platforms like Livejournal or Myspace where they are really mostly designed to facilitate blogging to an audience on that specific site, not the 'net as a whole.

Hi Natalia,

I'll be posting information today.

The issue you raise about interaction/community I think is one of the most important issues. And one of my goals is to help encourage and facilitate good online conversations that reflect many different points of view both from within the dance community as well as from audience members and others who enjoy dance.

Could you possibly elaborate on your distinction between facilitating interaction in the manner of specific sites such as LiveJournal and MySpace versus reaching out to the Internet as a whole?

From a purely technical perspective, one of the things I can do is implement a site-wide registration/authentication system, but also allow people to post comments even if they are not registered.

But with the community tools/social networking functionality I'll probably be implementing, people who don't register will not be able to take advantage of all the functionality. But, in the end, that's a choice each person can make based on how engaged they want to be in the conversation.

I'll write more about community functionality and goals once I post overview about this expanded blogging platform. Plus, it would be great to hear from others about what they hope from their participation in online communities.

At the very minimum, you have to allow people who are not registered to comment. I promise you, and I doubt I am in the minority about this, that if I have to register for yet *another* website account just to post a comment, I won't. Forget it. I have too many accounts as it is.

As for the closed vs open community aspect... a lot comes down to the registration-to-comment thing. If you are not someone who hangs out on Myspace to begin with, the platform does not do much to help outside people get to those blogs (I think they are not even indexed by search engines?) and you have to sign up to comment. Livejournal has a lot of functionality limiting who can read your posts, making it easy to isolate yourself to just your own little network. That's a great model for personal journaling, *bad* model for dance blogging.

Why are you going the "social network" route? Everybody and their dog has social networking capability. I have "friends on over a dozen sites, and most of those networks don't amount to much. What will the network actually *do*? Every forum I am on has added social networking functionality in the past year, people went through a frenzy of adding each other as "friends", then the tool languished, because after you have added those friends, it's basically static. The few tools that I think have really moved beyond that include LinkedIn and Yelp, but both of those are built on a model that allows people to mine their social network for something of value. So what do you anticipate people being able to get out of your social network above and beyond what they could get from just e-mailing someone directly?

Natalia,

Good points about roadblocks to participation and limits of social networking.

I get annoyed too when I go to post comment on blog, but I find out I have to be a member of the site before I can add a comment. So I usually just leave the site.

So that's a good point for me to keep in mind. At the same time, depending on the site, many people may derive significant value by signing-up to join the community.

In terms of social networking, I was writing in short-hand. When it comes to blogging, I do like some basic forms of sharing/networking so people can learn about each other. This is especially true in a focused community such as in the dance world.

I like the functionality on the Huffington Post blog. There are threaded conversations. And for each comment you can access a list of all of that person's comments and a list of all the posts that person has commented on. Plus, if people want, they can add a list of bloggers and commenters that they like and follow.

It's pretty basic functionality as social networking sites go, but I think it is more than enough.

I don't mean to nag on this point, but I just feel like you need to be clear about your goals. Having a profile is great and useful, but it's not really social networking. It's just a way to put a little more information to a name. I am familliar with the Huffington Post, and those profiles really don't function as a social network. You can follow bloggers you like, but the functionality is focused on aggregating content, not creating a network of two-directional interaction.

Social Networking is a big buzzword right now, but it's more than functionality that mimics an RSS feed. And not every site or concept is going to benefit from it.

It sounds like your focus right now is on building a blogging destination. That's fantastic, but that means the structure of the interaction is driven by blog posts. i.e. there are bloggers who present an idea, or describe an experience and down in the comments, the conversations will be multiple readers publicly reacting to those posts, potentially with some discussion pushing off from that starting point.

This is different from platforms like forums that promote more free-form conversation, or more specialized sites that are focused on connecting people on a more one-to-one way.

I get the impression that you want to encourage fascilitating the creation of one-to-one relationships between participants, and I think you need to brainstorm functionality above and beyond blogs to fascilitate that.

Natalia,

Thanks for your follow-up comment.

Different applications - blogs, message boards and social networking sites - do have more or less defining features that distinguish them from each other. But, at same time, I think that some functionality from one can definitely be incorporated into the feature set of another.

We're really discussing definitions here (and different people define these apps differently), but I think that Huffington Post has basic social networking functionality. For example, the ability to track bloggers/commenters is similar to the concept of having friends on MySpace and other sites.

That said, I am building a blogging platform/destination site as you say. And, in some instances, the functionality and feature-set may cross over into the realm of what is sometimes thought of as the capabilities offered by the other types of community applications.

To what extent do I plan to facilitate one-to-one relationships? I'm not sure yet -- it depends what readers/visitors would like.

I know we are really discussing definitions here... :) But when people talk about web 2.0 "social networks" it's really all about the spiderweb of two-way connections between people who have some kind of connection analogous to a social connection in the real world. Tools that allow you to aggregate the posts of "favorite" writers are uni-directional, and so do not conceptually map the same kind of interaction.

and I get what you're saying about how much one-to-one interaction your users will want you to fascilitate. But I'm not sure it's the best idea to leave your platform uncertain on that front from the beginning. I think whether you chose to make it into a one-to-one-focuased platform, or a one-to-many platform, people will find ways to get great things out of it... as long as they can up front see that there is some benefit to them from using it. I think if you are too uncertain about that purpose, then it's harder to sell people on that value up front, and the site will take off slower.

Maybe set up a poll, or do some "market research"-type questionaires up front to determine what kind of tool people want, so you can incorporate that into your platform/software development?

Natalia,

I think we have somewhat different ideas of how to define the categories of community/publishing software applications and how fluid these definitions can be.

If you take a blogging/publishing platform such as MovableType, and its latest version 4.0, which will soon be out of beta, it's obviously intended for blogging. But there are many directions to expand this application over time based upon the needs and interests of your community. I'm not writing this to disagree with your point that you need to have a vision upfront of what you intend to offer and where you're going. I'm simply saying that a blogging platform can be very flexible in terms of supporting your long-term, changing needs.

Polls definitely make sense. I found this wrap-up of polling applications this morning on Mashable.