Reimagining www.asp.net, Part Three: The Community Experience

If you’ve been reading my blog for awhile, this post will contain some things that sound familiar to you. The goal for this section of the site is to provide a mechanism for the community to congregate. I’ve already attempted to do that with ManagedAssembly.com. Many of the ideas in this section have come out of my experience building that site. In fact, I would suggest reading the reasoning behind creating Managed Assembly before continuing with this post.

The primary goal of the Community section is to give developers a reason to keep coming back to the site. The way to keep them coming back is to consistently provide fresh content to discover and discuss. Social news sites are perfect for aggregating blog posts and articles and promoting the best ones. But there’s a lot of good content that only exists in Twitter streams. The .NET community has a particularly good Twitter community going, so we need to tap into that as well.

Aggregating and organizing ASP.NET-related content

Social news sites like Digg, Reddit, Hacker News and others have become a standard way to aggregate and share content. The .NET community even has at least four (that I’m aware of) of these types of sites. The current ASP.NET site is already attempting to aggregate the best content, but why not outsource that to the community? The .NET social news sites have proven that it this type of thing has value. The very best items can be promoted on the home page which could result in significant traffic for content producers, likely leading to more quality content.

While all the current .NET social news sites do a good job of promoting quality content, none of them have a big enough audience to spark discussions. Only a very small percentage of users will comment on a given post, so you need a critical mass of users to have meaningful discussions. The ASP.NET site already has the traffic to allow for this. There will be people who try to game and spam the system but that can be overcome with a proper moderation system. Hacker News and Stack Overflow have proven that gaming and spam can be managed at a large scale.

Hacker News allows people to submit either a link or a topic to be discussed. One common type of discussion topic is a request for reviews of a project that was built by the poster. I’d like to see this for .NET projects. Most people know about the high-profile sites that use .NET, but I want to hear about what you built with ASP.NET MVC, jQuery and IronPython over the weekend just for the heck of it. There’s a lot that can be learned from seeing how people actually built something and how they used the tools we all use every day in some unique way to accomplish something you didn’t think was even possible.

I think the next evolution of the standard voting sites will be Twitter integration (or whatever the next real-time distributed discussion method is). You could track links posted by Twitter users who are known to post ASP.NET content and then automatically present those stories to be voted on if enough people tweet and retweet them. Nothing would be auto-published without being reviewed by the community but it was provide an easy way to find new links quickly after they gain traction on Twitter.

How do you get a list of ASP.NET Twitterers? Let them opt in. Right now there’s no good way to find other ASP.NET Twitterers. Why not create a directory of them? Take that directory and use it as a starting point to scan for links (with the users’ permission of course).

Once you have a list of all the Twitterers you can do more than just harvest links. Twitter’s trending topics are a complete wasteland now, but trending topics specific to a community? That would be interesting, especially during special events like MIX and PDC.

If you really wanted to take it to the next level, have human editors pick the best Tweets and feature them on the home page. Give people that are creating quality content the exposure and recognition they deserve. Let a couple people have access to the account that’s pulling the tweets, tell them to favorite the best ones and feature them.

All these Twitter-related features exist to pull value out of the places existing conversations are happening and repackage it for people who are new to the community, refuse to use Twitter or don’t have time to invest in following Twitter more closely.

Now that we have the ability to find the best blog posts, articles and Twitter content, there’s only one more type of content that changes often enough to be worth organizing: podcasts. The current site lists the latest episodes from popular podcasts which is a good start. I would expand that to include episode ratings and discussions and provide a more organized view of a podcast’s metadata and episodes (like iTunes).

Coordinating real-life events

How many *good* user group web sites have you been to? I haven’t seen that many. If you want people to get together and talk about your technology, why not provide them the tools to do so? A simple user group web site and registration manager, tied in with a directory of user groups and their associated events would help a lot of groups be better organized and get more attendees. Upcoming meetings can be listed on the home page, helping with publicity that can often be hard to generate on your own. These tools should actually be part of a larger solution that spans product lines, with each subset hosted on the specific site it pertains to.

Please chime in with your thoughts below. Tomorrow I’ll wrap up this series with ‘The Toolbox Experience’.