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Photo credit: Jani Helle

Betsy’s recent post “What makes it a community” made me think about my own experiences running communities and the approach that I like to take.

Community has been part of my life for the past 20 years. My first experience was with a homebrew Bulletin Board called The Nutwork that ran on my Commodore 64 out my parent’s basement. This board ran faithfully on my Commodore 64 and eventually ended up running on my Amiga.

The Amiga based BBS was one of the first non-PC systems to join FidoNet. FidoNet taught me the dynamics of having thousands of people participating in online discussions through echomail. With the Internet came Usenet Newsgroups and later on web based forums all upping the ante on the fun things that happen when you get volumes of people interacting from the safety of their computer.

Today, I am a part of an experiment at Microsoft called Channel 9 which is a community that combines wikis, forums, weblogs and streaming video to give an insider’s view to Microsoft.

Enough with my online community resume onto the purpose of this post. I am often asked by People who are starting an online community or involved in nurturing their community on how to handle the common scenarios your community will face in keeping conversations on topic, moving threads, etc.

In the spirit of Robert Fulghum and his book All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten, I always reply, “All I really need to know about online community I learnt tending bar”.

I like to think of online communities a lot like your would a neighborhood pub or a campus bar. The administrators/moderators are the bar staff and the members are the folks who have stopped by for a drink, fellowship and entertainment. Our job is to make a great place that you want to come back to again and again.

We take this same approach in running Channel 9.

• A good bartender knows when to be a part of the conversation and when not to. If someone is alone and has no one to talk then the bar staff will often join in and make them feel at home. If the crowd is having fun then they should just sit back and keep the bar clean. That’s why sometimes we might be in a thread or we might just let one go and create a life of its own.
• Sometimes the role of the staff is just to clean up the mess at the end of the day. On a message board this usually means moving threads to the appropriate forums, deleting spam and fixing broken links in posts. I compare this to when bartenders make sure that the peanuts on the floor don’t start a fire or that there are no health code violations.
• Patrons of a bar are free to choose what conversations they have at their table, they can talk about bars where there might be different music, better food or how much they don’t like the atmosphere of the current place. As long as they are not beligerant to other patrons thats ok. On Channel 9 we have conversations about competing products, our products and even how we can improve.

The last bit is on tone. Whenever we talk or post videos on Channel 9 we try and keep a peer to peer over a beer tone. Someone coined that back in the Sitebuilder Network days at Microsoft and its stuck with me ever since. Its not about presentations and API slides it is about truly connecting with individuals, just like you would while having a talk over a beer.

It has been a little over seven days since our team launched Channel 9. I’ve had some instant message and email conversations with Customers and Microsoft employees on our use of RSS with Channel 9. I need to write some help on this for the site as I don’t think its clear as to how deep you can go with RSS on our site. I’ll start first with this weblog entry and eventually I’ll move this post into a help file for the site.

Currently there are three levels of RSS support on Channel 9: Uber Level, Section Level and Thread Level. All is RSS 2.0 and the last time I checked it validates with the RSS Validator.

**Uber Level
** Selecting the XML icon to the right of FAQ in our global navigation provides an RSS feed. This one includes the top level threads for the entire Channel 9 site. If you want to follow everything this is the one you’ll want to point your aggregator to.

_Image showing the XML icon for the Channel 9 uber RSS feed_

**Section Level
** If the Uber feed contains to much noise or if you want to break out your feeds by categories, then section level feeds might be more useful. The section feeds allow you to subscribe to just one section of Channel 9. An example would be if you only want to subscribe to the videos then use that section’s RSS feed. It is located next to the title bar for that section (image below).

Our feeds do support RSS Enclosures as well so the videos should show up in your favorite aggregator. If your aggregator does not support enclosures we provide a link to the video as well.

_Image showing the XML icon for the Channel 9 section level RSS feed_

**Thread Level
** The final level of RSS Support is at the thread level. The idea behind this is instead of using email to track threads you are interested in we use RSS. You can subscribe/unsubscribe to a thread without using our system.

Its a pretty cool way of doing it and I use it all the time to keep tabs of what’s happening in my threads. To subscribe to a thread select the orange XML icon to the right of the thread subject.

_Image showing the XML icon for the Channel 9 thread level RSS feed_

**Continous improvement
** We’ve made some tweaks to the feeds since launching, we added guid support and adjusted titles of the feeds. Unfortunately our enclosures just links to the streaming files, I’m working on getting it so that these link to the full download for the video.

We need to figure out the best way to link to the responses to a particular item. Some folks have suggested using the RSS Comments and others recommend Slashcomments. I’d really like some feedback on the best way to do this, what would you like to see. We are using a hybrid of forums and weblog software so I am not sure if it is appropriate to use the RSS Comments tag for the follow up posts.

Watch Channel 9 on your TV
You might have noticed a custom RSS Module in our feeds, this is for Newsgator Media Center Edition. Newsgator Media Center Edition uses RSS Enclosurers to bring Channel 9 to your television, its a pretty cool way to keep current on our site.

**Some things we want to add
** Soon we will add a watch list for you to track threads you find interesting on the site. With one click you can mark a thread as something you want to track. You’ll be able to get quick links to your threads from your Channel 9 profile. We’ll also give you an RSS link too for these, I’d like to allow users to expose there watch list as an RSS link to other users to. We also need to turn on RSS Support for the Channel 9 Wiki. FlexiWiki does not provide full content in its feed, so we need to add that in.

**OPML Support
** Once we fix other bugs and add features requested by our users I hope that we can add an OPML listed of Channel 9 users that enables people to track the webloggers and feeds submitted by Channel 9 users. We’ll need to add an RSS element to people profiles, but I think this could be pretty cool.

It has been a lot of fun working on Channel 9, thank you for visiting the site and giving us your feedback. We’re working hard to make it a fun place to be.