July 12th, 2005 in Site News

Ask Readers: A community on lifehack.org?

I am looking for a handy way for everyone to share and discuss topics related to lifehacks, productivity and GTD. Does anyone have comments or suggestions on solutions for forming a community? Currently my thoughts are using one of those tools:

Web forums: A traditional way. Able readers to ask questions and discuss about topics.
A community blog: Able readers to be a publisher in the form of blogging - to share their views and ask questions.
Mailing list, or Google Groups: Similar to web forums, but more towards in email style.

I want to see if it is the right time on doing something like this - It would be great to hear if you are interested on participating in this, and if you like to help out - for instance taking on a moderator role.

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Leon Ho

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12 Responses

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Comments

Mike M says on July 13th, 2005 at 1:59 am

I vote forum for it’s organizational features, but with an RSS feed.

I guess a community blog would do the same, but (IMO) it would be harder to get it organized.
TOLAXOR says on July 13th, 2005 at 3:19 am

MOODLE.ORG!!!
naton says on July 13th, 2005 at 4:41 am

How about a community wiki?
Wes says on July 13th, 2005 at 4:43 am

I like the idea of a community blog that would be user-moderated. Sort of like how the stories on digg get to the main page, users can deny it if it’s a dupe or fake. The problem with something like that is just what Mike pointed out, it would be harder to organize something like that.

This might be better achieved through a Wiki though, with the better topics being “promoted” to the community blog via votes/pageviews.
Javier Cabrera says on July 13th, 2005 at 5:12 am

I like google groups. We all use google and most of us have a gmail account; so using a google group is just natural, and easy too.

If you have a forum you have to worry about the monthly transfer, the moderation, the administrators, etc etc. Also, when a forum gets big, it gets slow. It doesn’t care how much dedicate servers you have, it just gets slow and people don’t like that.

If you build something, my advice is that you need something that works for 2 users the same way would work for 200.000 users. And i think that google groups are a good choice (the only thing you have to worry about is signing up as a google administrator, no dedicate servers, no hosting etc).

But i think that is better to make a online pull. That will give you an idea of how many people you’re talking about and what THEY want.

You have my support. Bye!
chuck says on July 13th, 2005 at 8:06 am

sure id like to see one
Ben Askins says on July 13th, 2005 at 10:49 am

Google groups works nicely.
Marc Smith says on July 13th, 2005 at 11:23 am

I would say start out with a Google group. It doesn’t take much in the way of time and resources to setup. Then, if it becomes popular to the point where it outgrows Google groups, install some kind of forum software and move it there. I’ve been in the situation where I setup a forum for a local community before and it flopped due to lack of interest. I wish I had done it the way I just described. That way I wouldn’t have wasted all that time. ;)
Leon says on July 13th, 2005 at 11:51 pm

Thanks for the inputs. I think we got some pretty good suggestion here. Let me try to list down some pros and cons and consolidate them here:

1. Community blog (may combine with Wiki to organize readers tips and discussions).
Pros: Very friendly setup in similar format with the main lifehack.org blog. Community able to manage and subscribe to its feed.
Cons: Take longer to setup and require moderators/supporters to get it running well.

2. Google group.
Pros: Easy to setup. Works well for small community to grow big.
Cons: Decoupled from main site. Will become messy when there are couple of active threads of discussion. Not a good format for community to contribute tips or short articles.

3. Forum (with RSS feed).
Pros: Most organized ways for discussion. Useful for many discussions and threads.
Cons: May not need some main features of forum - for instance we may not need categories initially. Not too suitable for initializing a community.

I see community blog or google group should be the choice for us initially.

Wouldn’t hurt to try them out (as beta) :) So let me investigate if there are any software (suggestions?) which are suitable for community blog and I will launch a beta site for us to test.

If there aren’t any good solutions on that then we can move onto the Google group which is easy to setup.
Wes says on July 14th, 2005 at 2:15 am

How about something like Geeklog? http://www.geeklog.net/
Leon says on July 14th, 2005 at 11:03 pm

Thanks Wes - it looks quite promising. I spent some time on this project and found Drupal which quite fits the bill of requirements as well. I have installed some test sites locally and will investigate those.