"His earliest revelation about how the TV medium worked—one that heavily influences Community—came courtesy of a Cheers board game he spotted at a toy store. He realized that the characters were so relatable and their dynamics so clearly defined that anyone could step into their lives—even in a board game." Brilliant interview with Dan Harmon - but this paragraph really leapt out at me.

"On my way home from FOO I sat staring out the car window, all of these impressions, ideas, and seeming contradictions bouncing around in my head. And then something occurred to me. O’Reilly’s human-centered approach is still a kind of systems thinking. O’Reilly is still building a model of what the geek world is working on. They’re just doing it through the social relationships that their employees form with other geeks. The “data” they gather is stored in their employees heads and hearts and in those of the wider community of geeks they bring to events like FOO. Instead of trying to live in the model, O’Reilly tries to live in the community."

"The first 5 summoners who received 1+ week suspensions who reply to this thread - I will reply to your post with additional details explaining the suspension." Great thread: trollers and griefers ask to know why they received bans, understanding that the complaints against their names will be revealed in public. Then, some of them appear confused as to precisely why their crimes were considered so. Interesting piece of transparency from the LOL staff.

"In their wisdom Sega had connected the console’s power board to the console with six wibbly-wobbly pins and made the disc tray’s lid switch from wishes. Dummying data to the edge of the CD was the least you could do for the asthmatic old dear’s clunking and whining laser." Wonderful piece from Five Players on Dreamcast piracy - and how the pirate community kept life in an undersupported piece of magic.

"The whisky social network". Ooh. Has potential, at least.

'"We studied these online gangs at the same time I was looking at the offline gangs and it turned out the model we were developing to explain the behaviour of the online guilds began to coincide with the offline gangs," says Johnson. "We could explain the data using the same mathematical ideas."' Which all makes sense, you know, but it's still interesting to see this stuff being done and taken seriously.

Matt Haughey on ten years of MetaFilter.

"Here are nine individuals who know more than you do about some elements of online communities - even if they couldn’t necessarily put it in writing." How did I miss this the first time around?

why do it? To borrow from the site's About pages: "First, it will help you find shows that others have not only watched, but are talking about. Hopefully it'll throw up a few hidden gems. People's interest, attention and engagement with shows are more important to Shownar than viewing figures; the audience size of a documentary on BBC FOUR, for instance, will never approach that of EastEnders, but if that documentary sparks a lot of interest and comment - even discussion - we want to highlight it. And second, when you've found a show of interest, we want to assist your onward journey by generating links to related discussions elsewhere on the web. In the same way news stories are improved by linking out to the same story on other news sites, we believe shows are improved by connecting them to the wider discussion and their audience." Dan Taylor explains Shownar from the BBC's perspective

"Get over your ridiculous programming-language prejudices and stop endorsing real prejudices. It's this crazy little microcosm/macrocosm mirror effect. You never find bigotry in people with options. It's true in programming and it's true in real life as well, and it looks as if it's true in both places at the same time and for the same people." Giles is right, and the idiots who reached for their retweet button are definitely wrong. Less of this, please.

"I think issues of power and governance are going to swiftly rise in importance on internet communities, as they expand to include more different kinds of people. It's interesting that some of the best, most resonant ideas on these topics that I've encountered over the years has come from political writers and may have been produced even before the internet." Mike has read lots of books, and his quotations/sources here are great.

"In the 14 months since [TeamFortress 2] shipped, the PC version of the game has seen 63 updates – “that’s the frequency you want to be providing updates to your customers,” [Newell] adds. “You want to say, ‘We’ll get back to you every week. The degree to which you can engage your customer base in creating value for your other players” is key, says Newell. “When people say interesting or intelligent things about your product, it will translate directly into incremental revenue for the content provider.”" Great write-up from Chris Remo of Gabe Newell's DICE talk.

"The only difference between the end of Pownce and the end of Magnolia was that just one of those pieces of plug-pulling was planned. From the perspective of the people running those services, that’s a huge difference. From my perspective as an avid user of both services, it felt the same."

Some interesting visualisations of the way forum threads on dpreview - which has nested threads in posts - grow and progress. Interesting for the patterns it throws up, and somewhat useful, if only for rough, high-level analysis.

"This is just one of many examples that show you can participate in online community without having to pretend to be something you’re not. In fact, participating with authenticity is not just morally good, it’s measurably more effective."

"We're still going through the stats, but at the time of writing there were almost 170,000 messages on the Strictly [Come Dancing] board." Holy hell. Poor moderators. (And: for such an uninteresting story, as well!)

"SourceForge is about projects. GitHub is about people... This is a pivot of the traditional open source project website. A pivot from project to programmer. I love the pivot."

Oh gosh, the Rock Band 2 community site is lovely. Lovely URLs, lovely public-facing site with no wall, lovely. (Thanks, Brandon).

Oh my. Slides from Ludicorp's presentation in which they launched Flickr at ETech 2004. So much that's still so relevant, still not always understood. Wish I could just throw this at people at Develop instead of my talk.

"When asked if she planned to pursue her interest in fashion, she said no. 'I want to work with computers because they give you power.'" Some great stuff on "Passion Communities" as an alternative means of learning and education.

"Wetherspoons is a model of market efficiency. Prices are low, economies of scale are passed on to consumers and people are offered real choice, on the assumption that they are intelligent enough to deal with it."

"AudioJungle is a brand new audio community serving up thousands of stock music loops and audio effects by independent authors for use in your projects."

Disney are shutting down VMK despite its continued success and large userbase; as a "promotion", it's run its course. Some of the comments are very affecting. Lessons to be learned about the implicit contracts you create when you build worlds.

"The first incarnation of The Commons is a pilot project we’ve created in partnership with The Library of Congress." Oh gosh. There's so much wonderful, remarkable photography in here; I could lose myself.

Exhaust data is, I think, a clear case of "phatic communication." This is communication with little hard, informational content, but lots of emotional and social content. [It] doesn't get much said, but it has social effects so powerful, it gets lots done

"From where I stand, the only sane response is to keep our conceptions of friendship and affinity from being polluted by technical metaphors and constraints to begin with." Superb post by Adam Greenfield. Makes me question a lot of my recent design.

Dan Hill: "The Well-Tempered Personal Environment" Dan's talk from Interesting South. Something to watch when I have a bit more time; it looks like a wonderful concept.

Bizarre. Physical avatars for absent friends.

"Here are some of the common pitfalls that lead to failure when building social web applications."

"Toread represents the idea that we can be the sum of the knowledge of everyone who’s ever preceded us, that given enough time we can absorb the cumulative learnings of humanity."

Linked everywhere, but what the hell: it's a cracking nine-minutes Shirkyblast. Listen to what he says; it is good.

Delicious Food. Beautiful Photography. Created, rated and improved by you and fellow food-lovers from all over the world.

"I hate the term User Generated Content... I consider it a pejorative that reveals a lot about the person saying it. It makes members of your site feel like dutiful robots, crapping content that you convert into cash." Great article!

"The number one use of user-created content in virtual spaces is the screenshot. And that is user content creation. It is shared more widely, distributed, commented on, annotated." Raph Koster on form in this SXSW transcript

Many times, the roles that are taken up in an online community that's based around a "thing" are so structured and expectant that you could almost fashion carved wooden masks for them.

There’s nothing wrong with a service that appeals to tens of thousands of people, but in a billion-person internet, that population is also a rounding error. If most of the people who try Second Life bail (and they do), we should adopt a considerably mo

Crazy. And, of course, raises the point that online worlds could be impacting on the real world via environmental damage and power consumption...

Clay Shirky's wiki for discussion pattern languages of moderation.

Anonymous, simple, stripped down BBS software, just like 2channel