Looking back at Community Building

So this webblog started as an assignment for the Community Building module I study at my school. In this blogpost I will look back at this course... I'll have a look at the assignment and of course: myself.

Click on "Tell me more" to find out more...
Note: This may be boring information for some of you :)


So for this school assignment, we had to choose a virtual community. We had to participate in this community to know more and more about this community.
My choice was:

Del.icio.us.
I chose this virtual community because I looked at it earlier and wanted to start really using it, but never really started it. So this assignment would be a good push in the direction of really starting.

So I took a look in what Delicious really was and what the possibilities were. This was all explained very easy in the YouTube video I posted before. This video explains you should make a whole bunch of bookmarks, tag them and share them.

This all is such a nice idea and could really work. I even feel Delicious could make some profit by selling "premium" user accounts where users have even more possibilities.

So what went wrong?
Because of the lack of free time I didn't browse around so much, at least, not just for fun. This means I didn't visit much new sites. Because I didn't visit much sites, I didn't bookmark allot of sites, because I... Aaaah, you get my point.
I did spent more time free-browsing on my mobile phone, than I did on my laptop. Maybe it would help if Delicious was easier available on my mobile browser. Copy pasting from my browser to m.delicious.com isn't a option because I simply can't copy-paste a URL in my mobile browser. Nor have multiple screens open. Which is a real bug when having a very long url. A integration like the Firefox add-on would really help.

So... Koen and communities?
Didn't just stop at Delicious. Remember I also signed up for Twitter? Well I also updated my "old" Linkedin page and made some connections on Linkedin. Something I was planning to do way earlier. But I also created a Facebook profile, a Vimeo profile and even became a Xbox Live Update beta tester (with the new integration of Twitter and Facebook on the Xbox console).
So instead of becoming a member of one virtual community. I became a member of several and updated my old memberships. These events are all reported on my blog.
These new communities made me think of updating my own website.

www.KoenCoppens.nl
So as I learned in this module: Virtual communities have potential and are in fact "the future". So why not update my old website to become more web 2.0 fixated? So I did. I created a new design for my website. It's not finished yet, but the basic idea is there. In the near future, the visitors will also be able to see content of these communities on my website (with the help of widgets).

What's next
I will keep this blog running! Maybe it will be a little more about cool and usefull sites, rather then pure community fixed sites. I would like to ask you all to keep track of this weblog by following me with Google Friend Connect!

See you later!