Anyone know of a good weekly discussion community for the Web 2.0 tech world?
My father maintains an art and poetry blog at image-verse.com. He has two sites that he participates with that draw a fair amount of visitors: Poetry Thursday and Sunday Scribblings. Both sites officiate a weekly topic where the users submit links to their entries. The participants on these sites are quality people that leave thoughtful comments. Since joining these groups, my dad has developed a deeper relationship with his audience that has helped him with his craft and has pointed him toward opportunities.
Having recently enjoyed some good discussion at the PDXwi event with the Unthirsty cats, I’m curious if anyone in my audience knows about similar sites for our industry? I’d like a site where I could submit an entry once a week that explored Internet strategy, marketing, and/or web 2.0 tech. The trouble with our industry is that most of the site that would do something like this are spammy. I don’t want to participate in a bad neighborhood link farm or a site that wants me to post my content on their site. I’m looking for a good group of people with which I could share in a weekly discourse. If you know of any such communities, drop a brother a comment with a link.
Comments
I don’t know of a community exactly like what you’re talking about. Perhaps you should start one?
A long-planned feature of PDXWI is a place to aggregate member blog posts that are about Web stuff or would be of interest to other members. Even if we had this feature, it doesn’t sound quite the same.
Your Dad’s groups have a topic and each write about that particular thing, right? So, the topic might be “Ajax and Accessibility,” and everyone would leave a comment with their post? (You’re right–it does seem ripe for spam picking).
I’m with AdamD…you’re the perfect guy to start this kind of site, you know best how to provoke the conversations you seek and other will come play…
You know, guys, that’s not a bad idea. Adam, you’re right that it would be people responding to a topic and posting their replies as trackbacks and/or comments with links in them. I think it would require some moderation. Maybe it would just be a matter of requiring registration and if someone’s posts feel spammy, then I could cut off their registration.
Yep, initiate with standards of conduct. Will save aggrevation down the road. Play nice, play smart. And you’re a great moderator.
Looks like there is a blogging concept known as a Blog Carnival (thanks, Marshall!). I looked into a blog carnival directory under the technology category and I only found 2 active carnivals relevant to my area of interest. I’m going to see if I can participate in them, but neither is really structured the way I’m looking for. So, I’m currently buying a domain name and will be setting up such a site. I’m leaving for vacation on Friday for 10 days, which means I likely won’t complete the project until I return. Perhaps I could use a default theme on a WordPress blog to get things started…stay tuned.
Have fun, catch you later. Can hardly wait to see what you do!
The carnival concept popped in my head too. Personal finance bloggers have been using these for years. They’re great for a growing segment of bloggers looking to aggregate content and boost traffic (in addition to getting to know who’s who). But, for larger segments such as web 2.0/tech it’s probably more difficult to identify a good niche (but that’s probably where a pdxwi, or geographically based, group comes in handy).
Interested to see what you come up with.
Ryan, I’m putting out my first topic for the blog carnival this Monday (the 20th) for people to respond to by this Wednesday (the 22nd). I’ll drop you an email with a link to the topic if that’s cool.