Robert Scoble's new venture, Building 43, is using the Web's naturally distributed format to build community:
Our "Building 43," though, is not a place. It's not even a website. It's a decentralized community for people fanatical about the Internet. You'll find us on Facebook, on Twitter, on friendfeed, on Ning, and lots of other places too.
Scoble's Building 43 announcement is enthusiastic but vague (and what's with the unlinked URLs?) so it remains to be seen how he and his partners at Rackspace will develop the business. Nonetheless, I love the idea of creating a decentralized community through established platforms (Facebook, Twitter, Ning, etc.). We did this with O'Reilly's Tools of Change for Publishing -- combining a blog, Ning community, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and an annual conference -- and I was thrilled with the results. People gathered around their preferred platform: some folks used the blog, others congregated on the Ning community, and some found Twitter, LinkedIn or Facebook most useful. This aggregate model helped us discuss our core topics with a decentralized and engaged user base.
"Distributed community" runs counter to current advertising models -- you're no longer pushing audiences into your sites with your advertising. That's why I'm a fan of next-generation content efforts like the Guardian's Open Platform and Politico's content sharing network. Each of these projects tweaks the connection between audiences, content and advertising by acknowledging the essential rule of Web community development: audiences can go where they want, when they want, so you need to meet them on their terms, not yours.
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