The following was posted by Martin Rodgers on the Compulink Information Exchange, in the the_net/general conference, on 27th June 95.
I liked the Michael Strangelove item. Esp the bit about building communities. It seems to me that advertising and marketing have traditionally classified people and targeted them according to which group they "fit" into. Building a community - a new "identity" - sounds far more interesting, and much more likely to succeed on Internet and UseNet.
Cix itself is a good system for building communities. It's easy to do, just by creating a conf. I couldn't have predicted what kind of people some of my confs would attract, but I could be sure of the people who would not participate.
Perhaps this is the reverse of the technique used in advertising, where the community already exists, and the question is how to make the "product" appeal to that group of people. When you encourage a community to form by itself (with a little help from yourself), some of the ideas will come from the community itself.
The key here is to make it interactive. There's no doubt that a Cix conf can be interactive, and it's easy to understand the machanics of making web pages interactive. The challenge is to make the pages form a community of visitors, and to use this to sell something.
This also applies to the promotion of ideas. It's happening in this conf, too. Illuminations have a TV programme to sell to us, the viewers, and to the "publisher", the BBC. They're using this conf and their web pages to get feedback from their online viewers. In this conf, at least, we can see a "community", and if the web pages allowed visitors to leave something of their own, perhaps there would be yet another "community".
I can't help pointing out that I'm also using this conf. See if you can guess what it is that I'm "selling". ;-) Perhaps I'm simply looking for ideas, for use in building other communities? Can anyone please tell me what I've been doing for the last few years? I thought it was just for fun, but now it's getting serious, and I'm still not sure what it is that I'm "selling"! I only think of it as a potential way of paying my phone bill...
It's been a long time since I first discovered "information broking". A few years ago I began experimenting with it, when I got my first modem. Then I began to exploit it. Now people are finding me by using searching tools on the Internet, and then sharing their info with me, and I share mine with them. I love it.
Turning this into money is not the hard part! It only proves what I've been saying for a while now: You can never browse enough.