Category: Social Media

Community Thunderlizards

I recently hit a couple of interesting posts by Guy Kawasaki. For the most part, I like his content. However, he threw me a curve ball in his last post titled “The Art of Creating a Community“. The curve ball is the term “Thunderlizards”. Sweet, another buzzword! But what is it? My first thought was… Read more »

My idenity server idea is terribly flawed.

My identity concept was horribly flawed. I’m a little surprised I overlooked something so terribly obvious. As such, I suddenly realize what aspect of the identity problem OpenID serves to solve so nicely. I wanted to have a “home” system… and when logging on to a community, you would pass your login, password, and home… Read more »

Identity 2.0

I’m a huge advocate for the creation of a new generation of online identification. Dick Hardt of Sxip explained the current identity scene very well at OSCON. You can watch the entire presenation of Identity 2.0 right here. I’m was blown away at with Dick’s presentation. It was both informative and entertaining. He’s given me… Read more »

Isogame – The Virtual World Based Forum Interface Experiment

Several months ago, I started a project I called Isogame. Using bits of programmer art, art from old projects, and art borrowed from google images (apologies to artists) – I built a very basic isometric map with an html interface. Using some custom forum software I’d developed for another project, I connect each tile to… Read more »

News Corp Buys Again – Fox owns gaming community network IGN

News Corp must have a plan. Either that, or they’re still operating off of that mentality that drove so many investors to waste cash during the bubble. Recently I mentioned that News Corp picked up Myspace for $580 million. This time, News Corp purchased the massive gaming community network IGN. The price tag on IGN?… Read more »

ComScore Inflates Numbers: A Bogus Blog Report

The Social Software Weblog posted a bit about comScore‘s “Behaviors of the Blogosphere“. Halfway through the report, I was shocked. Ranking high in a graph titled “Top Blogs Ranked by Visits”, I found sites such as Drudge Report, Fark, and Slashdot. First I thought, “these sites aren’t blogs, what are they doing in this report?”… Read more »

Bringing Communities Together: Under One Login

Problem: I frequent several different communities on a regular basis and I must maintain an individual profile on each of them. Solution: One login to rule them all. The monolithic dark lords of all that is digital tried to solve this problem; but they have failed… Users did not want to sell their private lives… Read more »

Beyond the Blog: Blogging Alternatives

Blog Blog Blogidy Blog I suppose I’ve been a blogger longer than I realized. In August of 1996, I started making weekly web updates regarding the progress I was (or wasn’t) making on a computer RPG project. Back then, we just called them websites. Actually, to be more accurate, we called them Web sites as… Read more »

A Few Good Forum Ideas

I’d like to share a couple of forum structure ideas that have made managing the Gearbox Software Forums a little easier and an idea we’ve yet to try. Internal Combustion Many message boards offer a forum dedicated to allowing users to flame. For example, the Xterra Owners Club used the traditional and cleverly name, “The… Read more »

Community Building Case Study: Tips from DallasFestEvil.com

Introduction I began development on the DallasFestEvil.com website around July of 2004. I was working in conjunction with a promoter (now retired). Up-to and during the event, we worked to build an online following. Our budget was very limited and we were working with a previously unsuccessful festival. Somehow, we managed to pull it off…. Read more »