Saturday afternoon I will be sitting on a Web 2.0 panel for the John Hopkins Entrepreneurship Conference. The conference takes place downtown D.C. at the Carey School of Business from 1pm - 4:30pm. I haven’t been to D.C. since I was a little kid and my parents took me on the death march from landmark to landmark. I’m looking forward to drinking with a couple college friends and my cousin. If you are going to the conference PLEASE email me so that we can make a special effort to meet up. I look forward to meeting some cool new people. Thanks to Sam Huleatt for setting this up. [tags]Social...

Looks like Virb snuck one past me, and the rest of blogosphere. They have quietly launched a new version of their beta social network. They are currently only allowing a limited number of sign ups each day (334 left today at time of writing). From the front page it looks like they have a lot of stuff coming. I will have more about this later as I get a better chance to play around with the site. In the meantime, go grab one of the limited sign ups. [tags]Social Networking, Social Network, Virb, Online Community, Music, Purevolume, Brian Balfour[/tags]

I’m currently brainstorming some expansion ideas for my blog, so in true online community style I’m reaching out to all of my readers to get their suggestions. What I’d like to hear from all my readers: 1. Other topics you would like to hear about that fit into the current context of my blog (starting, growing, monetizing social networks/online communities) 2. Other topic sections. For example, social networking news, profiles of new social networks/online communities, interviews with founders of social networks, entrepreneurship, etc. 3. Anything else you think sucks/kicks...

A common questions is, what makes a good social network or online community? Obviously there are many different things that vary widely depending on the type and subject matter of the community. But to speak very generally I wanted to share 3 broad characteristics that I think great social networks share. Personality/Identity The best of social networks have their own personality or identity, just like a living being. Spend some time on a social network such as Yelp or Vimeo, and you will start to get a sense that the site is fun, creative, and humorous. Visit a site like LinkedIn, and you...

While I think some of the media hype about the “dangers” of social networks has started to die down, I still always hear questions about the responsibility of the companies behind social networks with regards to privacy. Social networks and online communities are in the business of providing a platform for users to communicate by sharing content, and ultimately their lives. They are in a sense, communication platforms, just like telephone towers are for cell phones, and the US postal service is for mail. Most (or at least the good ones) online communities don’t interfere with...

The 37Signals blog posted part one of a great conversation about community between 2 of the founders from each Vimeo and Threadless. If you didn’t already know, Vimeo is a spin off video sharing site from the founders of CollegeHumor.com and Connected Ventures. I highly regard Zach Klein of Vimeo as one of the most creative and innovative young entrepreneurs out there. He has a great eye and mind for building community focused websites. Jakob Lodwick (Vimeo), Jacob Dehart (Threadless), and Jefferey Kalmikoff (Threadless) are the other excellent participants

With all the buzz around social networking and online communities, I’m not surprised that many large corporations want to get in on the action. Unfortunately, many just don’t get it. Social Networking or an online community is not something you can just “put a few good people on it for a couple months.” There is no easy “if you build it, they will come” solution. Furthermore, building a community from scratch, is a much different beast then trying to integrate community into an existing product or service. Too many companies (partially including my own,...

I took the time to watch the CommunityNext presentation from the Threadless founders. While the video has a lot of good things in there, there was one point that I thought was above and beyond the rest. An online community is all about fun. When dealing with consumers, if using and interacting with your website and community isn’t fun, then people won’t stick around. Take a look at some of the most successful online communities. Myspace is a piece of shit, but users have fun making their profiles look like pink barf, posting wacky pictures, and setting Celine Dion as the music...

In my last post I discussed the importance of ignoring the common total registered users statistic, and paying attention to a couple different active user stats. When evaluating the value of a community, it definitely doesn’t stop here. For me, I place extra value on site activity ratios. Why Ratios? Site activity ratios are statistics such as average posts per user, or average comments per user/post, etc. But why ratios? Just like total registered users, total numbers for different activity points on a site are useless. A site that has 10,000 posts in a given time frame with 20,000...

This is the first of hopefully a few posts about different stats that social networks, investors, and entrepreneurs should pay attention to. While a lot of the value in a social network is subjective, I personally believe there is a lot to be said for close tracking and analyzation of an entire range of statistics and numbers. For the first post, I wanted to discuss the most basic, but probably most important statistic, Active Users. Many social networks publicize/boast how many total registered users they have. Unfortunately, this is the most misleading statistic of them all. There are many...