Continuing with Bryan's stuff, you can check out Athena Prep Academy at http://www.athena.edu. The key to having a successful VC as business is to entice folks to use it, the infrastructure part is very workable as we have shown on the Spring with our evolving conferencing interface. You need a good mix of folks who can keep conversations going and stir up ideas. Now, we're talking about "niche communities". An example of this is the recently formed 'bronte' conference here which has a nice mix of folks who are passionately interested in talking about the Bronte sisters. I believe this is a good model for other niche communities forming. We have a 'cars' conference that is multilingual composed of folks who are fervent about a particular make/model of car. Keys to success of business vc's are good hosting, management interest in the public areas, well thought out policies, and a lot of nurturing. It would also help to have a team of crack designers and professional hosts. Another area that is largely untapped is technical support, oftentimes customers can support each other via a conferencing environment. A good evolving example of this is our 'apps' conferencing that provides forums for about 350 software companies and is linked to all the reviews that Forrest Stroud writes on his renowned software review site at http://www.stroud.com. And this is 24x7 support, hard to pay for that level of support isn't it?

credit a mysterious Kerri for this research: BUILDING COMMUNITY FOR BUSINESS SITES Tipster, "Online Communities and E-Commerce," Webcentric, 12/2/97. Online communities help create repeat visits and can improve customer intimacy and add to E-Commerce sales. Six insights for creating "lasting bonds." http://www.webcentricman.com/html/i_tip_ec_community_1297.html Laura Miller, "Building Online Communities (that Sell)," Manufacturing Marketplace, 3/24/98. Michael Barrett of GeoCities discusses his firm's model to attract segmented groups, and then form them with a combination of encouragement and economic factors. Sees communities as providing low-cost content for business sites. http://www.manufacturing.net/dc/mm040398v.htm Matt Carkci, "Be a Destination," NetProfit, 4/5/98. To bring people to your site without high costs, recommends becoming a destination site by forming an online community, and by developing content appreciate customers of your niche market. http://www.netprofit-mag.com/issues/980405/980405.htm Kevin Jones, "Community Gives Rise To Commerce," Inter@ctive Week, 5/11/98. Business-to-business companies Tradecompass and Questlink Technology are adding e-commerce capabilities to their sites to take advantage of the information-exchange communities they have built up over the past year. http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/printhigh/51198/extra511.html

There was an article in the Wall Street Journal (January 6th (page B6) on virtual communities. It's a survey of community web sites. The hype lead quotes Media Metrix research as saying "Community sites are one of the fastest-growing categories of WEb sites". They present 5 categories of such sites: - Web-Page Building - Chat and Message Boards - Your own VIP Room: The Virtual Velvet Rope (for private web page sections and chat rooms, doesn't really consider private conferences) - Content and Services (mentioning Excite, Yahoo, MSN, Moms ONline and SeniorNet) - Shopping and cashing in (sites that let you set up links to online sellers and Xoom.)

terry thanks for pointing out that article. i have been interested in different ways to categorize the new interactive web sites and this should help.

Terry: Who would you like to see The Spring be more like? Generally speaking of look, feel, services offered, etc...

I'd like to see more users! More users=more content and at some point it means we get off the launching pad. We need more interesting sub pages that folks can visit and clearer navigation.

terry, have you ever considered using another conferencing tool besides yapp? i really really like Caucus (http://screenporch.com). it is super simple for users and presents a very nice UI. another option, that i am very seriously considering, is to rewrite the interface we use here on the spring.

We used Caucus here for about two years. It's still in the archives.

no way!!! i didnt know that. so any thoughts on going back to it?

Well, it's very expensive and Yapp seems to be very stable. It would be a major change. But we did use it for the first couple of years we were online. It was a whole different era with different players. You can read the stuff from this period in the "archives" on the Spring's main page. ECHO uses Caucus, and one of the first conferencing systems I participated in, MetaNet, used it. It has some interesting features, but I've come to like Yapp better. Of course, I haven't looked at the latest incarnation of Caucus with the web interface. I think we could customize Yapp with scripts to do the features that Caucus has, and both are linear as opposed to threaded conferencing.

that brings up a coupla good points. first, the latest version of caucus has an absolutely gorgeous web interface. it is really easy to use too. you can see it by going to screenporch's web site and surfing thru their demo setup. one potentially bad thing about caucus is that the telnet interface sucks rocks. that may not be such a problem since only 3 or 4 of us telnet in, but still. anyway, if you like yapp better terry, then i agree with you, since you da man. i think we definitely need to work on upgrading the UI for yapp.

telnet, web or both, Ray?

Caucus does both. ECHO has been pretty successful with it. I'll give it another look and see what the costs would be, both in terms of programming, relearning and actual dollar costs.

me, i telnet in about 95% of the time. when i do web, it is generally to cut and paste info into the science conf, which i need to so soon here. terry, i will be very glad to be your caucus admin, free of charge. i know a lot about the system, and can pop up to cedar creek when i have to.

Or, Austin. What's their demo website? caucus.com?

http://screenporch.com

what I meant, Ray, was which Yapp interface do you think needs more work, telnet or web?

Well, telnet is so limited to a few folks, but it's so awesome. The world at large is web crazy.

web, definitely. i've been reading the admin guide that comes with Yapp (admin_guide.ps) to decided where we should begin.

How did you read that postscript file, what did you use?

i use ghostscript on Linux. you should be able to snarf a copy of ghostscript for you boxen, terry. it allows you to not only view a document in an X window, but also to print it to a non postscript printer.

well, the web interface (and re-arranging it) is what I'm most familiar with, and Kaylene is great about answering questions...in fact, she has scripts for me to install here, but the only way I know how to do so causes bugs in some of them... what do you have in mind?

hey, Ray, can you "translate" that document into plain text and put it up on it's own page(s) somewhere around here and give me the url and/or just convert it to a text file and put it up on here somewhere so I can ftp it here? I've never gotten to read that documentation, if it's the one I'm thinking of...

there is no easy way to translate a ps file into anything readable, wer. let me take a look around and see if i can locate a converter. if you are on a windows box, i believe there is a port of ghostscript for windows. the admin guide file is titled "Yapp 3.0.13 Administration Guide." it is about 40 pages long and has the following sections: 1. introduction 2. getting started 3. user administration 4. conference administration 5. configuring the look and feel of the bbs 6. log files 7. troubleshooting Appendix. Man pages if you guys want, i can snail mail a copy of the document to you.

That would be very cool. Put me on that snail mail list. If you could get it in to Adobe Acrobat format so we could put it on the website, that would be awesome. Then it would really be world readanble and intact in the format it was intended.

I'd love to have a hardcopy, Ray!

This is that topic I couldn't find the other day. http://www.acquireedknowledge.com is the program that helps with pdf creation. That clipping of Daniels is still sitting next to my computer at home.

Ray: What do you think are the biggest negatives with the Yapp web interface?

the only negative aspect of it is that it is not laid out well. there is either too much stuff on one page or not enough. also it just doesnt look real purdy. this is all just my own useless opinion, of course. on the plus side, yapp is very fast and easy to maintain and use.

cool...what you mentioned is relatively easy to change...

which page(s) do you think are laid out poorly?

the main menu page and the conference home pages mostly.

main and browse, gotcha...what are your recommendations?

hmm, thats a good question... how bout http://screenporch.com for starters?

I can make main look like that, no problem!

http://www.tripod.com/explore/computers_internet/yourlife/columns/macdonald/980402.html a good article on virtual communities.

Great, I'll check it out.