WebSitesOfNote

The Art of Creating a Community: " I admit it: I’m user-group junkie. I got my first taste of user groups when I worked for Apple—speaking at their meetings was one of my great pleasures. Their members were unpaid, raging, inexorable thunderlizard evangelists for Macintosh and Apple II. These folks sustained Apple by supporting its customers when it couldn’t—or didn’t want to—support them itself. Now that Apple is the homecoming queen again, there are lots of people receiving, taking, and claiming credit for its success. The Apple user-group community deserves a high-five tribute too. Now that I gotten that off my chest; now I can move on to the topic of this entry: how to create a kick-ass community. I anticipate many comments to this entry, so I am warning you in advance that I am going to frequently modify and supplement this entry. RSS readers beware! :-) Create something worth building a community around. This is a repeated theme in my writing: the key to evangelism, sales, demoing, and building a community is a great product. Frankly, if you create a great product, you may not be able to stop a community from forming even if you tried. By contrast, it’s hard to build a community around crappy, mundane, and mediocre crap no matter how hard you try. Identify and recruit your thunderlizards—immediately! "