Pieces of me on community... : discovery

Where's Brian redux

b2ix — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 22:23:00 GMT

A few months ago I posted about ways of finding me in between blog posts:

First off is my del.icio.us account. This is where I tag a lot of things that relate to community and tech. Apologies in advance for the random political things that pop in now and again.

Second is my list of shared items from Google Reader. These are a lot of the items that I find noteworthy from the feeds of most interest to me.

Third is my Amazon wish list. I don't really do a good job of removing the ones I've read so it's both things I will be reading and things I have read.

(Note -- friendfeed has all of my del.icio.us, Reader and Amazon stuff all in one place)

Last but not least, I blog in a variety of places:
here -- work
here -- community in general (work and personal)
here -- running (personal)
here -- games (personal, not updated much)
Internally at work

Just a quick update. I've since been using Twitter a lot more, and I realized I didn't list Facebook as an option. So there you have it. More than enough ways to find out what I'm up to with community stuff. See y'all soon.

The Space Between -- Where's Brian?

b2ix — Sun, 09 Mar 2008 20:07:00 GMT

I am trying to get back on the blogging bandwagon but after repeated attempts of fits and starts, I've come to realize it's something that takes a lot of work from me. Don't get me wrong, I *will* keep blogging. I do want to be clear though that there are other ways in I intend on (hopefully) providing value to you and others interested in the intersection of community and technology.

First off is my del.icio.us account. This is where I tag a lot of things that relate to community and tech. Apologies in advance for the random political things that pop in now and again.

Second is my list of shared items from Google Reader. These are a lot of the items that I find noteworthy from the feeds of most interest to me.

Third is my Amazon wish list. I don't really do a good job of removing the ones I've read so it's both things I will be reading and things I have read.

(Note -- friendfeed has all of my del.icio.us, Reader and Amazon stuff all in one place)

Last but not least, I blog in a variety of places:
here -- work
here -- community in general (work and personal)
here -- running (personal)
here -- games (personal, not updated much)
Internally at work

Thanks to Commoncraft,* Josh and DMB for the inspiration in writing this.

*while I also have a Twitter account, I don't really use it so don't bother looking for me there. Should this change, I'll let folks know.

Forums and Forum Views

b2ix — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 20:54:00 GMT

Currently on MSDN and TechNet sites, we have forums organized in a general hierarchy of site, groups, forums, and threads (which contain messages). From an organizational logic standpoint this makes a lot of sense. A particular message belongs to a thread, which belongs to a forum, which belongs to a group, which belongs to a site. The trouble is, what if the message that someone wants to post (or find for that matter) can exist in multiple spots?

Right now, we address this situation through moderation. Threads can be moved, merged and the like such that the content is exposed in the most logical spaces, as determined by the existing hierarchy. The downside of this is that this is not really scalable long term.

Enter, forum views. What exactly is a forum view? Well, essentially it is the lens through which an individual views content traditionally collected in a forum. Uhm, ok...but how exactly does that change the current state of things? It all boils down to tailoring the forum content to your needs. In some ways, this is similar to saying "Show me all forum content, but only things that apply to these particular topics." All of the content would then get displayed much like a current forum. The main difference is that the content there is not always "housed" in the same forum. With a structure like this, the notion of an off-topic post becomes much less of an issue as that post can get displayed in the "correct" context for those who want it. This also opens up a wide range of options regarding forum creation, as well as facilitating public and private views. I'll get more into the how of all of this in a little while, but for now I'd be interested in hearing some thoughts on this.