"the social network" entries
Community Pricing for Books
The more I look at the TOC Conference program, the more I see creative sessions on social media. Right now, I'm in a session from Logos Bible Software talking about their creative pre-publication publishing model. Logos puts out electronic editions of religious and scholarly reference works, converting the works from the original. Basically, they study their costs, and figure…
Publishing as a social medium
I'm at our Tools of Change for Publishing conference in New York this morning, listening to Doug Rushkoff saying "The internet is not interactive media. It's interpersonal media," and explaining why the 50s went from a pack of gum with a baseball card to a pack of baseball cards with a stick of gum. "Baseball cards were a more…
Educating computer users: the need for community/author collaboration (Part 2 of 2)
Every real-world and online community faces the same basic development
issues. How do potential members view the community they’re about to
join, and how can the community welcome them by giving them the
competencies they need? What opportunities do the leaders have for
training other members, and what responsibilities do they have to act
on these opportunities?
Communities who identify competent leaders and put them to use
training new members can thrive in both new member development and
leadership development. Leaders need the proper tools and
encouragement in order to help new members. Among the crucial tools
are good documents. Communities can help members find and interpret
documents. And then some documents will rise to the level where
professionalism is rewarded.
Educating computer users: the need for community/author collaboration (Part 1 of 2)
The more effectively a project can educate its new users and turn them
into masters, the more successful it will be. Many people turn to
online content for information, but my research shows that it doesn't
work as often as it should. Tomorrow: toward a solution.
Developing an improved online environment for educating computer users
Let’s fantasize about a new online information system that combines the best features of
a wiki, a FAQ, a mailing list, an interactive tutorial, and
stand-alone documents in order to provide special features that
enhance users’ ability to find answers to their questions.
Done well, this system would make it fun and rewarding to contribute
information to user communities. People searching for answers would be
more likely to find and understand them, reducing the need for the
time-consuming hand-holding that takes place on forums. The result
will also enhance a key goal of all projects: to recruit new users and
make them comfortable using the system.