wanted: good match for pioneering online community

The Well, known to many as the original online community with Internet pioneers like Mitch Kapor, Howard Rheingold and Cliff Figallo, turned 20 years old this year. According to the BBC, The Salon is now shopping it around, looking for a benevolent suitor.

The idea of turning stand-alone online communities into non-profits, through self-funding of its own members is not new. Membership pledge drives and donations a la NPR just might be the correct model to keep things going.

developer community 2.0

cNet recently wrote an interesting article about new types applications called "mash-ups" that developers are building by combining information from different websites using Web Services platforms.

imagine developers building a buyer tool using eBay Web Services that is combined with a mapping API to show items they've searched on for proximity, so they can pickup purchases and avoid shipping.

Mash-ups allow independent developers to better control and customize the information consumers can get by extending the definition of developer community across more than a single platform.

Web 2.0, baby!

"one is silver while the other's gold"

i've been witness lately to a couple of cool "intra-community tool" ways to solicit developer input on our newly launched developer community tool, eBay Community Codebase. a good reminder to create new ways for developer communities to collaborate, while continuing to cultivate and improve your existing community tools.

in one example, we are incorporating the feedback of several developers from a discussion board thread into an upcoming release of the API Reference Docs project on improving the look and feel usability of technical documentation for developers.

Alan Lewis also blogged about how our new AddToWatchList API call could enhance codebase projects, such as our Tivo project.

leveraging established community tools to build momentum for new community tools is a great way to cross-pollinate activity & membership.