Forum Moderators: rogerd
I probably spend an hour or so a week contributing to the group that I run. There are two other regular posters in the group, one or two occasional posters and the other hundred lurk-a-lot.
I probably see three to four referrals a day from the group to my website.
Apart from that, not much concrete benefit so far, but I do enjoy it. Anyone else?
Orkut, for those who don't know it, is social networking site (well, business networking as well I suppose) set up as a project by Google employee Orkut Buyukkokten and launched on an invitation-only basis at the beginning of 2004.
Beyond the whole social networking side of things (internal message system, personal profiles, teasers, crush-lists etc.) there is an extensive network of grassroots communities, created by Orkut users and based around special interest topics (=anything imaginable).
It's large enough and varied enough that you can imagine it as a kind of moderated Usenet. Each group has a single moderator - the owner, who established the group - but aside from that it's very similar.
What makes it more up to date than usenet is that posts are published pretty much instantaneously, posts can be edited, you can look at the profile of the poster, contact them by sending them a message etc.
Okay, so it's a cross between a bulletin board and Usenet.
As it's still a fairly closed society, do you have the same spam/flamebaiting problems as public boards? I would assume the more controlled environment reduces the workload on that side? On the other hand, the more personal involvement compared to the more anonymous approach of public posting must bring it's own challenges.
I'd certainly be interested to hear the feedback on this.
The group owner can designate a group anonymous or non-anonymous. If a group is non-anonymous, a member wishing to post has to auto-register with the group before posting. But, evidently, this a lot more painless than the normal forum registering process, because you already have an account on the Orkut system.
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Just imagine webmasterworld, if any member could start a new forum in their personal area of interest, and anyone who started a forum automatically became the 'moderator' for it.
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Orkut lists about 1.5 million users, with over half from Brazil (so you get a lot of Portugese-language communities), so I'm sure there are a lot of communities out there with larger memberships - especially those which cover less esoteric subjects than Debian! There are several hundred thousand communities listed, but as I said, without a search facility they're difficult to find.
Another stumbling block is the server response-time, which is slow if you're lucky and broken if you're not. I know it's a closed beta, but so is Gmail and the latter doesn't suffer in the same way.
Added: Ok, scrub part of the criticism - you can search for communities, but not from the Search" page, only the "Communities" page.
- so there are several communities covering the exact same subject - for example, there is a "Debian" community and a "Debian GNU/Linux" community, the former with ~4000 members and the latter with ~2000. The "Linux" community has about 19000 members.The duplicate communities is something they really need to sort out soon. It's begining to look very disorganised. I would like to see sub-categories as well. For instance, if you click on the computers & internet category you get the complete list of all communities that fall in this category. Everything that is remotely related to computers & internet is there and English and non-english communities are mixed together in the list (which is sorted by popularity). If you're looking for linux or Brazilian communities you're in luck but if you want webmaster communities in English you won't find them by browsing (unless you're a very patient person and go through the entire list). There could be some really interesting communities in there, but it's just so hard to find them.
Another stumbling block is the server response-time, which is slow if you're lucky and broken if you're not. I know it's a closed beta, but so is Gmail and the latter doesn't suffer in the same way.It is extremely slow at this time of the day. However, if you login around 8 am - noon GMT, it's not too bad.
