HOLLYWOOD, Fla. -
It took only 45 minutes for the Think Tank: Community Sites
panel to degenerate into an outraged rumble about free
speech, censoring versus moderating message boards, and
whether it's time for a mass relocation across the border.
(Which border wasn't clear, as it was lost in the general
hubbub.)
If attendees expected to learn practical, how-to steps for
setting up community aspects and how to profit from them,
they might have been disappointed. But if they came to ask
questions about the hard facts of keeping up with the
evolving Web audience, this was the place to be.
Five expert panelists agreed on the following, if nothing else:
• Community means
visitors can interact with one another.
• Community makes
a site sticky, increasing retention for pay sites and traffic
for free sites.
• Visitors want
niches: Don't make the softcore, hardcore and kink people all
hang out in the same space. Give them their own venues.
• The live webcam
market is huge and, well moderated, attracts a very solid
community.
• Personality
draws people.
• When websites
give users a voice, someone will say something owners and
moderators don't like. If it's legal, leave it alone.
• People visit
sites to have fun, so give them tools to customize the
experience to their satisfaction.
• Watermark all
content.
• Monitor all
communities.
Attorney Eric Bernstein addressed the difficulties of managing user-submitted content in light of 18 U.S.C. 2257. All of the panelists noted the FBI hates porn and will pursue adult entrepreneurs with the slightest excuse, regardless their intentions and integrity - even if the text, images or video in question were posted by users, not by management.
Many of the strategies touched upon were repeats of Friday's Web 2.0 workshop, such as using intermediate sites to lead traffic from mainstream communities like YouTube and MySpace to explicit sites. In fact, community and interaction were common themes throughout Internext's Technology and Innovation educational track. (Consider that a hint.)
By the end of the 90-minute panel, the discussion had ranged from site hijacking and content theft to making sure website operators truly own their domain names, using affiliates to drive traffic to a new site and studying carefully who is visiting and why.
Sites that leverage user-submitted content must take extra care to police for illegal images like child porn; everyone needs to be excruciatingly aware of what users are talking about in forums, blog comments and message boards because the government will blame website owners - not their users - for things like pedophilia.
Functionality is more important than design in a community site, said moderator Marc Womack of Sick Site Network, as long as the look and feel is clean and easy to navigate. Make it useable and fast and don't waste too much time trying to make it "pretty," he advised. Users are there for content and interaction, not wrapping paper.
