FastCompany.com Update

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Where to begin? Since our newly blended journalism/community platform was released on February 11, we’ve received more attention for FastCompany.com in the few weeks than we did over the past five years. The one-two punch of a new FastCompany.com platform and the March 3 launch of FastCompany.TV, with famed tech blogger Robert Scoble, has certainly caught the attention of the blogosphere. These developments have led to many interesting discussions about the role of community within the mainstream media, as predicted when we first launched.

Before rounding up some of the feedback we've received, here's a look at some of our site stats:

*We now have 113,000 members. We’re growing memberships at about 10 percent a month. That’s five times faster than Facebook! (To be fair, I guess it gets a little harder to grow as fast after your membership crosses 50 million.)

*Our members have started about 946 blogs on FastCompany.com. We’re reading your blogs constantly and featuring new ones on the homepage and topic pages of FastCompany.com every day. I’ve been following “The Guide to Business with Earthlings” by Offyd Grinispuffs (yes, I know it’s a pseudonym) and “The World of StartUps Outside of Silicon Valley” by Francine Hardaway.

*User behavior on the site has changed dramatically. Before the new platform debuted, our average user visited just once per month. Our 800,000 or so non-member monthly visitors are still at that same pace; but once a visitor becomes a member, most are coming back several times a month.

Now to the media reviews, which were overwhelmingly positive. (I’ll throw in a couple of negative mentions so I can pretend to be balanced.)

Erik Schonfeld wrote this “nice post on TecCrunch:

“On FastCompany.com, you can now start your own blog, join a group, post a video, comment on articles, or suggest a “Fast Talk” question to start a debate. Articles from the print publication are interspersed with blog posts from readers, experts, and staffers, and are arranged in a blog-like chronology on the front page.

The idea is to make it easier for readers to interact with staff writers and contributors, and write their own thoughts, which might be featured prominently on the site. Every contribution a reader makes gets collected on his or her profile page, tagged, and placed into one of the eight sections on the site (innovation, technology, leadership, management, design, social responsibility, careers, and work/life balance). The site is built on top of the open-source content-management software Drupal. And it will support OpenID.

During the dying days of Business 2.0, I remember sitting in editor Josh Quittner’s office brainstorming about how we could do pretty much the exact same thing to save that magazine. We never got beyond the brainstorming. Whether or not this will work for Fast Company depends on how smart its readers are and how willing they are to contribute. But any media site that does not listen to its readers and, indeed, allow them to take over the conversation at times, is doomed for the dustbin.”

David Cohen called me up for his blog, BeatBlogging and wrote an extended piece entitled “What Magazine Websites Will Look Like in Four Years.”

“Fast Company, however, is trying to leverage the networking aspects of Drupal [the software platform used to build the site] in every way possible - from user-generated content blogs, to bookmarking, crowdsourcing questions and letting people make business contacts. They've spread their arms out pretty wide in the hopes that they caught something interesting for everyone. I think they are about 3-5 years ahead of their time in terms of Internet publishing with a major magazine.”

In his blog, One by One Media, Jim Turner “had the following to say: