Paul Ford, Web Editor of Harper’s Magazine, tells first in a conversation with journalist Choire published in Awl:

What I wish I could do is take our tens of thousands of nice registered subscribers and offer them a Metafilter-style community – something where they could create the content and talk and interact (with editors) and then we could promote the most interesting stuff to the home page.

Of course this quote is found by a member of MetaFilter and kittyprecious posts it on the site. There, moderator Jessamyn West remarks:

It’s just a pipe dream at some level. But people who run magazines would kill for the sort of community we have here. And most people that run community blogs would kill for the sort of income that magazines [still] make, relative to what most blogs make. So we sort of meet in the middle and talk about it. And it’s an interesting conversation.

Happily, it doesn’t stop there because Paul Ford is also ftrain, a member of MetaFilter, and he adds these precisions:

My point was that MetaFilter is one of the best communities on the web and that if comments are about community, and not just about traffic, then as a nat’l magazine Harper’s would be well-served to emulate the blue [MetaFilter], and maybe the green [Ask MetaFilter] and the gray too [MetaTalk].

Is this true? I don’t know. I doubt I have time to build it this year.

The thing that always strikes me about MetaFilter is that it’s a real editorial success. I’ve now spent nearly a decade (judging from the sign-up date of my first sock puppet, in the 300s) watching editorial norms emerge here. It’s not the same kind of editing that is done at a magazine — sometimes, sure, posts are killed or edited or helped along, but the goal is not necessarily to make every post better but rather to make the community better. It’s sort of like editing a river. Have you ever tried to edit a river? It’s hard, and the moderators here are genius. They have an art and a craft and a discipline. They keep the community working, and that attracts the right kind of people. It’s an amazing loop. It has much to teach me.

In the future I wonder if there isn’t a way for the different kinds of editing to combine. Could that be good for the web AND for magazines/radio/etc.? Interesting, useful communities where many people share a common sensibility, connected to — but not utterly dependent upon — more traditional media (like articles, or stories, and so forth).

Now, if you are in charge of a magazine and you are thinking that this is a good idea, you may wonder how something as MetaFilter has been built.

This is your lucky day because Matthew Haughey, MetaFilter founder, has just been interviewed on this topic by journalist Suemedha Sood.

I can’t recommand enough this interview to anybody interested in creating a community. A few quotes:

What about readership?
Matt: It’s continued to grow and grow — about 10 percent every few months, doubling every year. My Google analytics say there are about 17 or 18 million pages viewed by 7 million people around the world each month.

(Besides its founder, MetaFilter employs one full time programmer, two full time moderators and a part time moderator.)

What makes Metafilter a success?
Matt: I’d like to think it’s intense moderation and customer service.

Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

Video: Ouvert 5 Catherine Genest 2009

used with permission of the artist

I was planning to create a new site for a work in progress called “media machina” and I used this opportunity to move all my blogs under one domain, boutotcom.com, and one platform WordPress MU, and here we are at last.

It’s time to thank Robin Millette from Waglo Labs who has originally created this blog on Drupal and has taken care of it for years, and then did the hard work to move the content to WordPress; unfortunately, the comments have not followed, but I keep the original archives and we plan to find a way to bring them back;

also Patrick Tanguay from taste of blue who installed the new WordPress MU at iWeb, wisely helped me to chose  the theme Shantia by Nofie Iman and created the original design before leaving for Berlin;

and finally Francis Laplante from iXmédia who did the integration of the boutot.com domain, showed me the ropes and did the final set-up.

Thank you all for your patience that used up all my attempts at procrastination.

warrenellis I appear to gain more followers when I don’t actually post anything. I consider this to be a valuable lesson about the internet, and life. 7 minutes ago from web

hrheingold 74% of the earth’s population are social media strategists 17 minutes ago from web

mpesce Having massive brainwave. Had no idea it was coming on, then WHAM, there it is. Beautiful, terrifying, and will not be ignored. 7 minutes ago from web

How we have become filters:

Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move. Filter-then-publish, whatever its advantages, rested on a scarcity of media that is a thing of the past. The expansion of social media means that the only working system is publish-then-filter.

Communities are good and feel good:

Anything that increases our ability to share, coordinate, or act increases our freedom to pursue our goals in congress with one another.

Journalism crisis:

Philosophers sometimes make a distinction between a difference in degree (more of the same) and a difference in kind (something new). What we are witnessing today is a difference in sharing so large it becomes a difference in kind.

People are important to people:

We gather together because we like to, and because it is useful. (…) cities don’t exist just because people have had to be nearby to communicate; cities exist because people like to be near other people, and it is this fact, rather than the mere trading of information, that creates social capital.

Giving a platform and doing nothing:

Though it seems funny for a service business, Meetup actually does best not by trying to do things on behalf of its users, but by providing a platform for them to do things for one another.

Acting on a troll in Wikipedia (same process as with graffiti) :

… he or she had spent the better part of an hour lovingly crafting those three fake entries. I deleted all three in about a minute and a half; the prankster never returned, presumably disappointed by the speed with which fake entries could be undone.

Moderating communities 101:

… a basic truth of social systems: no effort at creating group value can be successful without some form of governance.

The individual is mightier than the marketing plan:

The transistor and the birth control pill (…) were pulled into society one person at a time, and they mattered more than giant inventions pushed along by massive and sustained effort. They changed society precisely because no one was in control of how the technology was used, or by whom. This is what is happening again today.

The first problem in intelligence augmentation: how do you make a human being smarter? The answer: pair humans up with other humans.

Given that we try to make decisions about our lives based on the best available information, the better that information is, the better our decisions will be. (…) every time we use (—-*) to make a decision, we are improving our decision making ability. We are improving our own lives.

Douglas Engelbart’s original vision of intelligence augmentation holds true: it is possible for us to pool our intellectual resources, and increase our problem-solving capacity.

—-* mark Pesce had written “Wikipedia” here but, as he acknowledges a few lines further: … Wikipedia is really only one example of the many tools we have available for knowledge augmentation. Every sharing tool – Digg, Flickr, YouTube, del.icio.us, Twitter, and so on – provides an equal opportunity to share and to learn from what others have shared. We can pool our resources more effectively than at any other time in history.

So many of us are interconnected that I am sure we can find people proclaiming the end of Web 2.0 as soon as Tim O’Reilly coined the idea in 2004. A good overview of the present “crisis” is given by Scott Loganbill in monkey_bites.

It really comes down to what meaning you give to Web 2.0. In 2005, when Tim himself gave a very thorough and complex explanation, I had the idea of copyrighting a very simple one: “Web 2.0 is about people”. I was working at the time on an urban community project with Sylvain Carle, now CTO of Praized. When I told him my copyrighting idea, he just typed the words in Google and, with his usual laid back attitude, turned toward me his laptop screen. There weren’t 1690 results as there are today, but certainly a hundred.

Too bad for my (flawed) idea of owning this definition, but it is still the most simple, clear and useful one today: “Web 2.0 is about people“: Web 1.0 is the Web of broadcasting sites, of one to many, of push. Web 2.0 is the Web where you interact with real people, one by one, whom you can identify, welcome, respect and memorize.

Web 1.0 is based on messages.
Web 2.0 is based on one person at a time.

Web 1.0 is the Web of products.
Web 2.0 is the Web of relationships.

Web 2.0 is not a trend, a fashion, a gimmick, a moment in time.
The Web is here to stay and more people are on the Web every day.
Opening real one to one relationships with readers and consumers is the revolution that is shaking all mass media and the whole marketing universe.

Mass media and marketing know how to push.
They are just beginning to learn how to welcome.

Web 2.0 is just beginning.

How much more powerful is (…) networked intelligence than a reporter with a phone, a Rolodex and the space between his or her ears?

As the former newspaperman and Web evangelist Jeff Jarvis (…) has been saying since before broadband, the Web is not just a way to shout, it is a way to listen, one that can lead to deeper, more effective journalism.

Part of the training of a Special Circumstances agent was learning a) that the rules were supposed to be broken sometimes, b) just how to go about breaking the rules, and c) how to get away with it, whether the rule-breaking had led to a successful outcome or not. Matter

Kevin Kelly:

Payment is
1) A way of connecting.
2) A sign of approval.
3) A vote.
4) It indicates an allegiance with the maker.
5) It feels good to the payer, to support.
People buy stuff, but what we all crave are relationships. Payment is an elemental type of relationship.

Jeff Jarvis:

Connectivity is a platform for society.

Paul Bradshaw:

Now I’m not peddling that old cliché that “everyone is a journalist” – but rather arguing that the process of journalism itself is increasingly open to deconstruction: the tools of researching, recording, publishing and distribution can now be broken up and distributed between teams of organised readers.

W.L. Gore (via Jean Fahmy):

3. Everyone can lead
Without rank, it gives every employee the opportunity to be a leader.