Following the incredibly tragic story of Abraham Biggs' live broadcasting his suicide, plenty of "web 2.0" critics such as Andrew Keen jumped on the chance to blast the "anomie, cruelty and narcissism that characterises much of the web." Of course, if you think social networks are evil, you're going to interpret events that way, but, of course, as has been pointed out before, communication tools don't discriminate over who can use them -- so of course there are some awful people who use them, just as there are many good people. Communication tools don't change that. And, for every tragic Abraham Biggs story out there, it seems likely that there are many, many stories like Ayelet Waldman, who talks about how her online community of friends saved her from committing suicide. Of course, those stories don't get nearly as much attention, so folks like Keen can pretend they don't exist and that social networking communication tools are mainly used for shallow, meaningless conversations.

Two contrasting articles crossed my desktop this weekend, both about how President-Elect Barack Obama is likely to govern. The first, by Mark Cuban, criticizes Obama for the list of economic advisers that Obama chose to consult concerning his plans to take on the economic downturn. Cuban, correctly, worries about who is missing from that list:

Notice anything missing?

Not a single entrepreneur. Yes Warren Buffett started a business, but he will be the first to tell you that he "doesn't do start ups". Which means there isn't a single person advising PE Obama that we know of that knows that its like to start and run a business in this or any economic climate. That's a huge problem.

I absolutely agree. It is the entrepreneurial spirit that is needed right now. But, at the same time, it makes you wonder just how Obama would have accomplished this. Any one or two entrepreneurs are unlikely to do a really good job representing all entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, for the most part, don't all view things the same way, and there's no real organization of entrepreneurs. The reason entrepreneurs become entrepreneurs is often that they see their own way of doing things and don't want to be locked up by convention. So, while it is worrisome that there aren't any entrepreneur-types on the list, I'm not sure I'd be that much more comfortable with a few entrepreneurs representing the interests of all entrepreneurs either.

That brings us to the second article. It's by David Carr in the NY Times, and looks at how Obama's campaign ran like an entrepreneurial startup itself, leveraging the internet and new technologies to do a complete end-run around much bigger and more well-known "corporate brands" in the political space. And it wonders if Obama will continue to use those tools to govern as well.

So, at the very least, one could argue that Obama, himself, is something of an entrepreneur, but more importantly, one would hope that Obama does, in fact, continue to leverage the internet to hear from folks -- and is actually willing to listen and take suggestions seriously. Why not create an economic roundtable of sorts online that lets more people weigh in? Let ideas in the mix bubble up to the top using ratings systems (and maybe some White House moderators) and contribute them to the mix. If someone has a particularly good suggestion, why not invite them to a meeting with those "big shot" economic advisers as well? It doesn't mean that every hare-brained scheme needs to be listened to, but if there's a good way to allow the best ideas to bubble up and get recognition, it could be quite a powerful new way to govern. To some extent, there's already some indication that this is where things are headed with the transition website Change.gov, but it remains to be seen if that's just a Presidential suggestion box... or something a lot more powerful.

Earlier this year, I wrote about how too many newspapers thought that adding "community" just meant putting comments on stories. That's not really engaging the community, though. While we've seen a few examples of newspapers doing a better job of really engaging communities, this new story out of Belgium may be one of the best examples so far. A reporter for a newspaper there, De Tijd, had been experimenting with some live blogging solutions, and decided to basically liveblog an editorial meeting where the paper decided how to cover a developing chapter in the financial crisis. While some others in the editorial meeting were nervous about "opening up" their editorial process, it actually was quite useful.

The wider community contributed plenty of useful feedback both on what they hoped the newspaper would cover (which was different than what the editors originally planned to cover), but also in providing more details about what was really important. It gave the journalists there much more insight into the real story, rather than the usual shallow coverage that often comes out of newspaper reporting on a sudden crisis (for example, recognizing that interbank lending -- or the lack thereof -- was a much bigger story than a collapsing stock market). It became truly interactive, with various journalists bouncing ideas off of the community and getting a lot of real time feedback to create a much better product.

Even more interesting was that after the reporter shut down the live chat, many in the group simply organized themselves into an IRC chat room and continued the conversation themselves. It's a fascinating story of how a newspaper embraced an actual community, rather than simply thinking that community was something you add on as a module at the end of the "real journalism."

NBC Universal, like so many big media companies, seems to view everything through a top-down broadcast media lens. For example, while it may seem like a good idea that the company is finally (finally!) recognizing that people may be craving local content that is sometimes difficult to find, there's something missing in its announcement of plans to create "locals only" websites targeted at specific geographic regions. You can read the entire press release and see if you notice what's missing.

Every single part of the description of the site is about delivering content to people. Nowhere is there any sense of actually building a community around that content. The only time "community" is mentioned is as a "target." The press release claims that these sites are aimed at "social capitalists" who are the leading influencers in their communities, but the company seems to have missed out on the fact that the reason those folks are influencers isn't because they sit back and just consume the content shoveled to them, but because they take part in the process. They share the news, they comment on it, they write it, they annotate it, they build on it and they help create it. But all that NBC Universal is talking about is taking the same old, old model of simply shoveling content to people.

It was definitely surprising to see Apple trying to enforce an NDA to stop iPhone developers from talking about their applications, so it's nice to see Apple (for once!) respond to the backlash by dropping the NDA. However, the company's explanation for why it had the NDA in the first place doesn't make much sense:

We put the NDA in place because the iPhone OS includes many Apple inventions and innovations that we would like to protect, so that others don't steal our work. It has happened before. While we have filed for hundreds of patents on iPhone technology, the NDA added yet another level of protection. We put it in place as one more way to help protect the iPhone from being ripped off by others.

It's unclear what "inventions and innovations" would be "stolen" (the company probably means infringed, not stolen, obviously) without such an NDA in place. Also, the patents are a separate issue. The whole explanation, frankly, is misleading. The NDA and the patents protect entirely different things in very different ways, and it's difficult to see how the lack of an NDA allows anything to be "ripped off."

Either way, it's good that Apple has recognized that such NDA's significantly limit its developers. It's tough to have much of a developer "community" when said developers are barred from communicating.

Seth Godin thinks Firefox is missing the point by launching new features in response to Google Chrome. He says the problem now is that "when your friends switch to Firefox, your life doesn't get better." Firefox needs to provide people with an incentive to spread it, so that the more people use it, the better it gets for users (think of a social networking site -- you have a better experience if more of your friends join). He suggests new communication and collaboration features that only work if you have Firefox.

I think he's missing the point.

He ignores the Firefox community. The life of a Firefox user does improve as the user base grows. A more vibrant community means better add-ons, bug fixes, security patches, phishing reports, translations/dictionaries, etc. -- all members benefit. Mozilla is already providing the sort of incentive he describes. Sure, there may be ways to improve, but I don't think they're missing the point.

Plus, "only for Firefox users" isn't the Mozilla approach. Mozilla wants to improve the web for everyone -- not just Firefox users. Mozilla thinks your browser should be like your phone or your car; it shouldn't matter if your friends or co-workers are using the same product. You don't need to consider which phone carrier your friend uses before making a call, or which car your co-worker has before providing directions; you shouldn't have to think about what browser someone uses before communicating with them online. People don't need special browser-specific features in order to communicate browser-to-browser, that's what web services (or add-ons) are for. Those kinds of features would make life on the web more difficult for everyone if they were Firefox specific, and if they weren't, Google could just implement them in Chrome.

The community is one thing Firefox has that Chrome can't copy overnight.

If you read some responses to Chrome from people at Mozilla, it doesn't seem like they're missing the point. Competition in the browser market is validation of Mozilla's mission for Firefox, and Mozilla plans to compete by continuing to innovate and to involve the community. Seth Godin makes a great observation about giving people an incentive to spread your product -- "people will recommend something if adoption improves their lives" -- but he doesn't mention the ways in which Mozilla has already taken that to heart. How do you think Firefox became popular in the first place?

We covered the ridiculous lawsuit that JK Rowling had filed against a fan who created a reference book, The Harry Potter Lexicon to supplement her massively popular novels. At the actual trial, it appeared that Rowling didn't have much of a legal argument against the publication, so she went for an emotional argument that can be summed up as: she just didn't like it.

Contrast that to situation around author Stephenie Meyer and her Twilight Vampire books (as pointed out by Against Monopoly). Meyer actively embraced the fan community as much as impossible -- including encouraging fans to create a comparable Twilight Lexicon reference guide, Meyer not only was thrilled, she helped fill in some characters' back stories. And, it's worked. The community has responded to her and become huge evangelists for the series and everything associated with it. These days, if your fans want to help advertise your works for you, it seems pretty backwards to then sue them for it. Nice to see that other successful authors aren't following Rowling's awful lead.

A few weeks back, we wrote about the question of whether or not newspapers should be getting into the community business by noting that you don't build communities, you enable them. But, the question still remains how you enable those communities. Gawker had an interesting post recently along those lines arguing that newspapers shouldn't allow comments on articles. The argument is, basically, that a lot of the comments are really dumb, and don't add very much. That may be true, but in many cases, that's because the newspaper doesn't give anyone incentive to add smart comments. There's no indication that anyone at most newspapers read the comments. The authors of the articles rarely, if ever, respond to people in the comments. There's little to no engagement or discussion. So, instead, the comments just become a way for readers to vent. Just tossing up comments and thinking you've created a community is a mistake -- but that doesn't mean newspapers shouldn't enable comments. It just means they should do so in a more intelligent manner.

Ed Felten has a great post questioning various government regulations forcing "local" ownership, advisory committees and content for certain types of broadcast media. Felten points out that local content makes sense for local communities, but communities aren't just defined by locality anymore. In fact, he points out how such "local" broadcasting rules made it more difficult for him to keep in touch with his "local" community back in Princeton, New Jersey, when he spent a year on sabbatical in California. Due to those local restrictions, he couldn't get the local television stations from back in Princeton that he enjoyed.

But, perhaps an even bigger question (which Felten doesn't touch on) is why there need to be regulatory mandates for local content in the first place. As we were just pointing out, in the newspaper business, newspaper chains that have aggressively focused on producing local content have found that it's quite profitable while the newspapers that focus on more national news are struggling. In other words, the market itself seems to reward local content without any government mandate. So why is a government mandate necessary at all?

There's an interesting debate going on among some newspaper industry watchers, concerning how newspapers should approach the question of "community." Paul Gillin has written that the concept of newspapers building communities is a fallacy and that newspapers shouldn't even try. He notes that the idea of a community around newspaper content usually just doesn't make much sense, and newspapers are simply hopping on the buzzword bandwagon in yelling "community" without any real sense of how to build one. As he notes, a newspaper's strength isn't in building community, but in creating content.

Steve Yelvington blasts back that Gillin is quite mistaken and that community is the most important thing that newspapers should be focusing on: "Failure to build community is one of the many reasons so many newspapers are in so much trouble right now."

To some extent, both Steve and Paul are correct -- and I don't think they actually disagree as much as Steve makes it out in his post. The traditional newspaper business model worked because the readership was a community of sorts. They were a community of "local" readers who could be advertised to. The problem for newspapers is that they didn't necessarily understand this, focusing solely on the content creation side. But they didn't realize that other sources of information were creating other places where similar (and different) communities could form and be advertised to. That started eating into that "community" of newspaper readers, because there was no plenty of competition providing a much better community experience.

So, yes, Steve is correct that newspapers do need to get back to cultivating a community -- but Paul is correct that simply yelling "community!" and thinking you can throw some "community features" on a site aren't going to do very much. What the rest of the internet has shown is that you build community not by building a community, but by enabling a group of people to do what they want. And that can include commenting on the news, creating the news or sharing the news among many other things. There isn't a magic bullet to create a community -- but newspapers should look to see what they can do to enable a community to form and then get out of the way.