Music + Technology + Random Nonsense from the Music Industry, by Ethan Kaplan

There has been a lot written about newspapers lately. I wrote this about newspapers when I worked at a paper, and presented it to people there:

The Internet is not a medium for the presentation of static pages of content, where you expect a user to just read it and not react. By its very construction, the Internet lends itself to people communicating with other people, and as far back as the beginning of the technology, e-mail and discussion groups formed the core of the online experience. When you provide your visitor with a “voice” in the context of your website, you are not only engaging them in a way that is much more tangible and active, but you are also promoting the notion that your site is a unique place where the user has a say in its construction. Too often websites are constructed under the “if we build it, they will come, buy and leave” philosophy. What this fails to do is engage the user in active participation, which is the fundamental model for Internet “surfing” in general.

The same things that make real world communities so vibrant, engaging and essential apply on the Internet. What we gain on the Internet is the advantages of this mode of communication: lack of time, space and demography. Online community is as close to social utopia as we can get, and that adds tremendous value to a website; both in the users trust for the company providing the information and by increasing the users involvement in the site.

We want to change “if we build it, they will come, buy and leave” to “come in, login and live.” The goal here is to make the site the users home on the Internet, and base the rest of their surfing experience off of the online community we provide.

I wrote this when I was 18, in 1997. In 1998 we put up the first OC Register community forum (called Dialog). I ended up leaving OCR in 1998 and then the whole newspaper chain in September, 2001. Planes flew into two towers, newsprint prices went up and the first thing to go was the Manager of Online Community Development.

Oh well.