Hi,

as community websites like WikiPedia are growing and Yahoo! is building and buying so called "social media websites" like http://del.icio.us
see also http://money.cnn.com/...z20_120905/index.htm
and "tagging the web" http://www.flickr.com is popular, I think GT should also have a look into this.


A first approach might be to include something like Jags "Personal Page Plugin" ( http://www.gossamer-threads.com/...;;page=unread#unread ) into the next release of Gossamer-Community and in addition some tagging-features.



The following two links give very good information on others ideas:

Some additional ideas may be found here: http://www.emilychang.com/go/ehub/

The Museum of Modern Betas lists all websites which are currently in status "Beta": http://momb.socio-kybernetics.net/



What do you think about this ?


Best regards,

Erich from Austria

correction: I just discovered that the Plug-In called "Personal Page Plugin" is actually hooked into G-Links and not into G-Community.
But nevertheless, it is a great Plug-In.


Another question: is there a possibility to extend G-Links into some sort of Blog-system ?



Best regards,

Erich

Hi,

I think as you say Erich, the move today is towards creating and thus controlling content that is published. This is the base of what makes Google and Yahoo. What better way than to get everybody to help you do that.

This is what I feel Google did a very good job at with Gmail. They created buzz around the product, provided limited availability and then got people through invitation to beta test it for them. The last part was a pretty slick move and provided them with a great way to accomplish the goal of getting it tested and creating the (pre-)hype about it.

At the moment on the Internet the main sound and successful stories are search engines. Directories are having a harder time. Links is highly capable of providing quality content in a categorized manner to people. The content you need to get people interested in your site can be provided by your visitors in the same way that Google piggybacks of everybody’s content in order to provide their search engine service. By getting people to want to be part of your community and making sure that they want to come back and publish content for you, you are a winner. If on top of that you have a real passion for the subject/area your site deals in people feel it and it just adds to the interest people will have for your site.

I feel that this community or 'social media' is the key. Finding ways for people to share their experiences may well be the means...


John
Significant Media

Hi Erich,

You're correct the Personal Page plug-in works via Links but you can then have Community updating Links where appropriate and the plug-in would then in effect be working with Community. If as in my case you are creating articles and not links then the big chunks of data for the article and related data are better managed by links anyway, just like if you used Links for a blog, which is a project I started working on with GT and stopped midway due to other community users having indicated they were working on identical projects. Maybe the wrong choice since nothing has come of them and since I was advocating simple function additions to Links to obtain a blog system rather than a new system (although pugdog had a similar approach).

I suppose I would describe the Personal Page plug-in as a container geared at providing users with the ability to personalize content in a structured manner. You provide globals with values the users can change like how many should I display, in what order, display or not and then it can go as far as enabling them to create content like their own presentation and you could easily have them linking to specific links, articles in the directory / magazine...
The stuctured manner is more of a censorship approach on the visual aspect of the page in that you let people decide what content they publish and then give them different fixed choices as to how to display it, so that it doesn't look like a christmas tree. Not that I want to kill the christmas spirit LOL, but some personal page systems let people choose between so many conflicting font colours etc.

John
Significant Media

Hi Jag,

many thanks for your feedback.

Using links as a blog is very interesting for me as I want my users to tell their stories (like their travel experiences as I am working on a travel-related website) .....

As you are writing there was not much outcome on this from forum-members programming, I think it would be much better if GT would write a "Blog-Plugin" for Gossamer-Links. I want to have GT as my software-providing-partner as I know I can rely on these guys and they are doing a perfect job in terms of support.


Best regards,

Erich

Hello all,

I just found some great "Social Networking" applications.

- Is anyone of you using these kind of applications and could report on it ?


http://www.ning.com/?view=xapps

http://developerdiscussion.ning.com/