Attending Web 2.0 Summit here in San Francisco serves a twofold importance for me. First, covering it from the perspective of a journalist/critic. And secondly, as a content provider. With that in mind, like everyone else in media, I’m concerned about how new developments in consumer behavior have affected media overall. Especially of interest is the YouTube phenomenon, which I discussed earlier today. But equally of interest is the growth of social networking and whether it works as a business model.
So I attended a session hosted by BlogHer called, “BlogHer Presents…World Domination via Collaboration,” to learn whether there are answers to any of these questions that the collective media has about its own future.
Here’s what I learned in terms of building community and social networking..
Speakers included:
Jory Des Jardins, Co-founder, BlogHer LLC
Caterina Fake, Co-founder, Flickr
Jessica Hardwick, Founder and CEO, SwapThing.com
Lisa Stone, Co-founder, BlogHer
Jenna Woodul, Executive Vice President and Chief Community Officer, LiveWorld
Jory: What about if you’re brand new?
Caterina: You may want to invite them in to moderate. Communities tend to take on the characteristics of the founders. Managing diversity in communities is an incredibly difficult thing to do. One of the things we found with Flickr, we had Muslim women who were showing their midriff and it was not acceptable to other Muslims. It lead to a lot of product changes on our part. We had to build certain product features that enabled certain levels of privacy and terms about the level of nudity.
