Audio and notes from Ted Rheingold’s talk at the recent Carson Workshops summit: The Future of Webapps. I’ve been well aware of the buzz surrounding the summit and have been patiently waiting for podcasts to appear on the sites of the various speakers or their entourages. Ted’s talk was titled ‘The State, Future and Business of Passion-Centric Online Communities‘ and explained much of the theory behind his site Dogster (and Catster), a free online community for dogs (and cats) with opposable thumbs, or presumably their owners. I dig the the buzz-word ‘Passion-centric’, it must be an instant hit as far as they go!
“Passion-centric online communities are dedicated to a particular interest and allow users to become completely immersed in their own passion.”
I was particularily happy to hear him mention Deviantart, an online community I’ve been actively involved in for many years, watching it go from strength to strength with each rebuild of the underlying framework. One of the obvious reasons for the success of Deviantart is indeed the passion of its users and their overzealous interest in its development roadmap, which could be damaging if not for the depth of their knowledge and experience.
Many other successful social networks get a mention and we get an insight into the types of strategies Ted uses to keep his community happy and continuously expanding. A few of the less commercial methods could be applied to to our enthusiastic online education community here in Australia and provided me with a lot of food for thought. Well worth a listen and hopefully not the last podcast to emerge from the summit.
Update: All of the podcasts from the summit are available now.
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