What's a 'community advocate'?

Last month I posted an entry about Platial and commented that “I think it’s kind of cool that so many of these new companies have community outreach people, even if it is still sometimes hard to tell them from publicists or PR professionals in general.”
This prompted Tracy Rolling to write me a long interesting email message about how she became a community advocate and what the job entails. I asked for her permission to reprint it here on the blog and she agreed:
>It’s a really interesting question because it’s one that those of us in these roles are asking and answering for ourselves as we go along.
I know another person who does a similar job at another site, and what she and I both have in common is that we were underemployed,
educated moms for a couple years, spending way too much time on
social networking sites and blogs and such. We are online community
junkies. I was a latecomer to the internet, partly because I lived in
France during the 90s and partly because the internet never really
seemed that compelling until I found my first online community (an
egroup of friends of a friend, all from Iowa like myself). Email? I
was and still am an avid epistolarian (is that a word?). Buy train
tickets online? I pass the SNCF outlet every day. But yack it up with
a bunch of new and old friends, gossip, tell secrets, discover that
the imaginary people are actually real… that’s compelling. Both
myself and my friend got our jobs by writing a lot of free feedback
for friends’ websites and having the friends say, “Hey, want to work
on this project with us?”
>
>There’s an interesting problem in the social web boom. Often the
people who are most knowledgeable and savvy about the politics,
functioning, and workings of online communities are people who have
been spending a lot of time slacking off in front of the computer in
recent years. How does a new blogging network service, for example,
go about recruiting these slackers? Or even understanding that it
would be a good idea to have one on staff? I know of one site that
had a guy in my role whose background was in e-commerce. He had never
belonged to or even heard of any major online communities except for
Friendster. He didn’t even really use the site he worked for that
much! But he was recruitable.
>
>I do a lot of different things at Platial. Marketing to be sure, but
specifically grassroots-style, relatively low-impact marketing. I
contact people who have great content and try to help them make maps.
I write to online community mods and ask them to post about maps that
I think are interesting to their communities. I write to bloggers.
>
>The most important thing I do in my job is I communicate with users.
That’s the community I’m advocating for. I make more maps than anyone
and know how to use the site best. I gather feedback, I chart
feedback, I follow up on feedback. I’ve got some kind of friendly
relationship with most of our main power users. If I notice someone
on the site having trouble with their images or something, I send
them a message offering help. I answer ever single feedback email we
get within a week, usually faster. I listen to people and I advocate
within the company for what the users are asking for. Because I use
the site myself every day, I know their frustrations when things are
broken and I know the excitement when a long-awaited feature gets added.
>
>I also try to make connections between users sometimes. We have a
beta tester club comprised of people I’ve chosen to invite because of
the high quality of their feedback. These people get early
notification of new features and often get to test drive stuff on a
testing site we set up. It’s great having a bunch of extra hands on
the site looking for glitches in the hours before a new site launch,
and we really appreciate how much those people care about what we do.
>
>I keep the faq updated, I make how-to screencasts and instructables,
I blog, and I do a ton of qa. We’re a small company (5 full time, one
part time, and a design intern), so everyone ends up doing a lot.
>
>Thanks for your time (if you made it all the way to the end–I know
it’s long). When I read your post it set me to thinking.
So there you have it.

Google buys JotSpot

Google is getting serious about its online groupware offerings, adding JotSpot to Writely (now part of their Docs and Spreadsheets offering). CNet has more as some analysis including a mention of Wetpaint the hosted wiki service that drives our client HTC’s user-community site.

Funny blog spam today

It was actually trackback spam:

Failure is not an option. It comes bundled with your Microsoft product.

That time again

Last year I did National Novel Writing Month and managed to bang out 30,000 words of my novel For You, The Stars.
I wrote nearly every day of the month and averaged slightly more than 1000 words a day, short of the 50,000 word target for NaNoWriMo participants but still a heckuva lot more fiction writin’ than I usually do.
In fact, in the elevent months since I’ve added just one or two thousand word installments to the pile. So this year I’m going to do it again. I estimate that the first draft of this novel needs to be about 80-100,000 words, so if I keep up the pace I managed last year I’ll have the draft 2/3rds done by the end of the month.
For those hooked readers who occasionally send me “what happened next?” comments, thanks! Your encouragement – while not sufficient to drive me to the keyboard much since January – has definitely contributed to my desire to keep writing this occasionally very dirty novel.

Berners-Lee: Evolve HTML incrementally

Tim “Invented the Web” Berners-Lee on a way to evolve HTML without the abrupt disorienting changes characterized by the switch the XHTML: Reinventing HTML | Decentralized Information Group (DIG) Breadcrumbs

Grattan School evening lecture program (SF)

Robert Birnbach, who shot the awesome author photo on the page-cover book-jacket flap of The Power of Many writes to tell me about an evening lecture suries he is helping start called The Grattan Speaker Series, “featuring locally and nationally renown authors, educators, activists and thinkers, and focused on themes that resonate with San Francisco families, neighbors and concerned citizens across the City.”
Here’s more about the series:
> Offered 4 times during the school year, the series seeks to grow a sense of community and demonstrate Grattan School’s commitment to being a place where the well being of children and families are addressed at the highest level, where dynamic thinking occurs, and where community is engaged. The talks will be held in the school’s auditorium and a suggested donation of $8 will be asked for at the door, with all proceeds benefiting the school. No one will be turned away.
>
> In addition to the evening adult audience, each speaker will also be asked to commit to time with Grattan kids during regular school hours, thereby integrating the speaker themes into our student community. These kid forums may take the form of general assemblies or small classroom audiences and will be offered at an age-appropriate level.
>
> Dates:
>
> + Thursday, September 28 – Tim Redmond, Editor-in-Chief of the Bay Guardian
> + Thursday, November 16 – Craig Newmark, Founder of Craigslist
> + Thursday, January 18 – tbd
> + Thursday, March 1 – tbd
Newmark will be speaking on the topic “craigslist (community in the 21st century).”

Raw notes from technology roundtable with former Presidential candidate Mark Warner in San Francisco on November 17, 2006

When I have a moment, I’ll upload the lo-qual cellphone pictures I snapped and embed them here. Maybe I’ll even get around to cleaning up these raw notes into something coherent or even listing who all was there. For now, all I have time to do is dump the notes I t9’d into my “smartphone” and gmailed to myself:
>warner:
>tech change cuts through everything
>
>fundamentalist fear of sweeping change… how to prepare people for the inevitable change?
>
>beyond tech industry policy issues
>
>how to help people get their voices heard
>
>most politicians lesson from Dean is fundraising, meetup, and something vague about blogs
>
>danah:
>media, always a generation gap
>
>natural to kids, unnatural to parents
>
>adina:
>industry issues more about incumbancy vs innovations
>
>warner:
>i fought the incumbents on the telecom issues
>
>i think we need a national policy re broadband and need to protect innovator’s ip
>
>??:
>a creative commons model plus individual choice
>
>adina?:
>principles going back to the founders
>
>anil:
>tech industry is politically incompetent
>
>we look to politicians for leadership
>
>tech change not inevitable
>
>warner:
>i would argue america got seduced by the tech bubble
>
>but it’s happening now… evangelism is called for
>
>jon:
>and education
>
>danah:
>we are behind in mobile because of carrier lock down
>
>politics needs to get beyond money
>
>me:
>how to get politics beyond money???
>
>warner:
>tech = economic promise but the issue got elevated beyond national leadership
>
>mary:
>i disagree
>
>craig:
>i strongly disagree
>
>mary:
>1890s railroads bubble (analogy), then carnegie
>
>was approached by a candidate in 2004 but not interested in campaigns… unless it’s taken straight into governance… but they were scared
>
>craig:
>acceleration… viet nam 8 yrs, iraq 3 yrs
>in the next 3 wks i’m scared of a gulf of tonkin
>
>i believe just get the bad guys out of the way…
>
>kaliya:
>overarching theme is freedom
>
>anil, wagner james:
>techies exhibit real unseriousness about terrorism and predators
>
>wj:
>partisanship
>
>space race target analogy
>
>cultural not political the 30s
>
>danah:
>parks analogy
>
>me:
>freedom opportunity national greatness

Glorum, a tagged forum about anything

Mario Rizzuti pointed me to his vaguely Digg-looking discussion-forum project called glorum. I asked him to describe the purpose or “mission” of the site and he responded thusly:
>It is an attempt at building a concept for online discussions alternative to the usenet model.
>
>The key ideas are
>
>1. using tags (no groups)
>2. +/- feedback (no moderators)
>3. browsing (tagged) users (social networking potential)
>
>Hopefully it would reach some kind of critical mass, prove some value and take 1 of 2 directions:
>
>1. a delicious-like database. Ideally this would make niche discussions possible, something like a long tail of discussions.
>2. an open source piece of software that would compete with current message boards. In this case the news would be that discussions and users could now (at least theoretically) be aggregated thanks to tags.
>
>It’s online since 4 weeks. It is currently just a prototype with about 30 users.
Sounds like an interesting experiment.

Jacco Niewland releases swipr, a Visio plug-in for information architects

According to Jacco Niewland, swipr is “a toolset for Visio that allows the integration of sitemaps/screenflows and wireframes into one fully interactive HTML deliverable.”
Swipr is released under the GNU Open Source license, and is completely free. It “allows for one screenflow/sitemap document and multiple wireframe documents to be exported into one integrated HTML set, viewable by any browser; it also has the option of creating a simple prototype from all your wireframes.” It’s suited for collaboration by teams of multiple IAs and it doesn’t require any special plugins to view the HTML prototype output.
Niewland suggests that the prototypes created by swipr are suitable for early usability testing, and that the documents print well from Visio.
At swipr.com you can download the software (still in beta), see examples, and contribute to a forum.
Thanks, Jacco!

Yahoo's time capsule

Austin Govella posted a link to the IA Institute mailing list the other day pointing to Yahoo Time Capsule, an intriguing project for gathering memories from users and making them browsable in interesting and innovative ways (that may break the browser in some use cases, but still… pretty cool).