Big companies like Microsoft and Netscape don’t have to try very hard to reap the rewards of maintaining online discussions. Their developer populations are large; critical mass is virtually ensured. What if you want the same dynamic to work for your smaller company? It’s often not enough just to create a newsgroup (or a web-based bulletin board), throw open the doors, and wait for a vibrant community to form. In this game, critical mass is, well, critical. Experienced discussion operators know that for everyone who posts, there may be a hundred or more who lurk.
This doesn’t mean your site can’t attract a community of users interested in your company’s products or services. It just means you have to work the process a little differently. One of the best strategies is to use web pages as portals into your discussions. You want to do more than just keep a record of those discussions; you want to enhance them. The key point is that every online discussion, whether NNTP- or web-based, generates a raw document database, or docbase, to which you can (and should) add value.
What’s a docbase? Mail folders, newsgroups, and web archives
are all examples of docbases. That is, they’re collections of
files, stored in directories, containing text that’s structured
according to some rules. For mail and news messages, the rules are
preordained and specify a set of colon-delimited headers (e.g.,
Subject: Tuesday meeting) followed by a message
body that’s just more text (which may exhibit internal
structure, such as attachments encoded using MIME, or Multipurpose
Internet Mail Extensions). For web archives, you need to invent the
rules. HTML pages don’t require headers, for example, but
applications can easily create and use them; Part II is full of examples that show how and why to
do that.
A discussion docbase, no matter what its underlying format, provides various ways to navigate its messages—for example, by thread or author or date. But it can’t create views that summarize the discussion, or rearrange it, or guide it. Users of the discussion tool confront a raw message stream; it’s up to them to separate the wheat from the chaff.
As the operator of a discussion group, though, you can and should summarize, rearrange, and guide the discussion. How? Figure 2.3 shows how a web page can act as a portal into a discussion.
This page, which appeared on the WebBuilder site (http://www.webbuildermag.com/), is an example of the Web interface to a set of NNTP newsgroups I ran there. In this fragment, we were discussing the capabilities of the Win32 version of an application suite called StarOffice. The quoted bits are just part of an underlying message stream that contained more chatter about StarOffice and about all sorts of other things. The page selects a few cogent postings about StarOffice for Win32, highlights them, and provides links back into the discussion at those points.
Why do this? Web sites are always hungry for fresh content. Here’s an easy and effective way to recycle user-contributed messages into pages that have a thematic focus. These summary pages—which may be posted or perhaps summarized in email bulletins to subscribers—help make your site appear as busy and active as, in fact, it probably is. But they work harder than that. The discussion links multiply the ways in which people can find, join, and contribute to the discussions, which helps you get to critical mass. More subtly, they can be used to reward your outstanding contributors. In every online community there are a few people whose knowledge, and generosity with it, are exemplary. Acknowledge them! Call out their most salient postings in pages that you feature prominently on the site. Close the feedback loop, and you’ll amplify the power of your discussions. The success of slashdot.org, and of what the media are now calling weblogs—sites that aggregate personalized views of the Web—has shown this approach to be one of the most effective drivers of online traffic.
The Web naturally tends toward aggregation; sites encapsulate other sites, which encapsulate still others. To be an effective user of Internet groupware, you need to understand and exploit this principle of aggregation and apply it to the content that you and others create. To do this doesn’t require the kinds of applications we’ll build in Part II and Part III. Mostly it’s just a matter of working smarter. For example, the vendor of StarOffice, Star Division GmbH, does run NNTP newsgroups for its users. But like many such discussion areas, that one doesn’t serve its proprietor as well as it could. The Web part of the site links to the newsgroups but doesn’t do anything more with them. In addition to advertising the newsgroups and generating fresh web content, richer interconnections between the Web and news domains could help the site gather raw information. Consider FAQs. Discussions often raise the kinds of questions that go into FAQs, and often produce answers as well. A newsgroup in and of itself isn’t a substitute for an FAQ, so like most vendors, Star Division consolidates the raw information into a set of formal FAQs expressed as web pages. But why not link from those FAQs back to their roots in the discussion? This technique works two ways. First, it connects readers of the FAQ to source materials—and these connections are otherwise far from obvious. Second, it leads readers of the FAQ who can contribute further clarification to a place where such contributions can appropriately be received.
Getting the most value out of discussions also requires that you index them and make them available for search. Oddly many sites, including Netscape’s, Microsoft’s, and Star Division’s, don’t bother to do this. How do you index newsgroups? Some servers, such as Netscape Collabra Server, Microsoft’s NNTP service, and NetWin’s DNEWS, come with built-in indexers. But newsgroups are just sets of text files. You can index them using any file-oriented indexer, and you should. If you take the trouble to invite people to pool their knowledge, you owe it to them (and to yourself) to make that knowledge as accessible as it can be. Chapter 8, has more on indexing newsgroups and organizing search results.
Although I’ve focused here on NNTP newsgroups, everything I’ve said applies equally to web discussions. O’Reilly & Associates’ WebBoard, Lundeen’s WebCrossing, and many other products support HTML-based threaded discussions. It’s tempting to conclude that such discussions, because they manifest as HTML, must integrate more naturally into a web site than NNTP newsgroups can. Yes and no. It’s true that nontechnical audiences may feel more comfortable viewing and posting by way of the familiar browser, rather than the less familiar newsreader. But HTML discussions are as likely to become isolated ghettos as NNTP newsgroups are. Connections between discussions and the rest of your site only happen when you make them happen. And the method in both cases is the same: editorial selection, URL-based content aggregation.