Blog tools
For quite some time now (for several years in fact) I have been building online-community software. Recently however I have felt the need to stop and step back from it all and look afresh at what has been built and what is being requested. I wonder if I have been traveling in the wrong direction…
It strikes me that users are forever asked to come to our community-spaces, to learn how to use yet another set of tools and rules. But why? Look at the take up of blog software. Why are we not building tools to integrate into these environments, these places where people already feel safe, feel in control and are more likely to invest time in? Why generate yet another online identity for someone who is already investing a lot of time in an existing online persona?
I guess where I am heading is to suggest that those tools that I would have built into the next online community platform should instead be developed as plug-ins to blog software instead. Perhaps the place to start with this will be to define an underlying API on which such tools can rely.
More on this to come…
Add comment November 12th, 2005