Actually, every online community lives off of this concept and if an online community, as a whole, is done right, with the right software, the right attitude, the right amount of hard work, then practically any community can flourish and be successful.
In this post, I’d like to go over how Skooppa might help with this lifecycle with a very top-level view of this concept. Again, I can’t go into too many details, but since this concept is the basis for the Skooppa network, we feel it is necessary to let you in on our views and how they form the basis for what we think will be some greatness.
The Skooppa Knowledge and Opinion Lifecyle
User’s Interests
So let’s start with the user’s interests. In what people call today’s “social networks”, people are connected together via their personal relationships. This is called a dyadic tie. The users share some sort of personal relationship, be it being friends, acquaintances, co-workers, colleagues, etc.
With online communities, users also have dyadic ties. However, they aren’t always personal in nature and most of the time they actually aren’t.
What ties people together in online communities are their common interests.
So, that being a fact, online communities have been social networks since way before “social network” even became a hip internet term.
Skooppa’s network will build on the fact that people want to share their knowledge and opinion about certain interests and that they want to be informed about those interests automatically. More on that at the end of this post.
External Content
Today, online communities are fairly fenced in, when it comes to acquiring external content. If site owners want external content, they have to basically go out and find it and at best, they can automate content feeds into their own site or purchase content. Not many do the former and very few do the later.
Although this is one of our bigger secrets, just imagine content coming to you, as a site owner, based on the subject your site is about. You can select content to be shown on your site. It might be at a cost, but it could be free too. The important thing, you don’t have to go looking for it. And, it can be your own unique content.
We also think content or the object of discussions can come from totally different places than from users.
That other place is from the users’ devices. Machines are becoming more and more a part of our lives. Ubiquitous or pervasive computing is growing and Skooppa will support the machines in our lives, in our communities too, so that we can talk about what they have to say.
Skooppa Sites
Skooppa Sites are the glue to the network. They are the point of creativity. They are the point of community. They are the point of interests. They determine the topics covered within the Skooppa network and they are the content and data creators.
The Skooppa platform will enable community owners to be creative, unique and successful.
One might think a platform might deter creativity through proprietorship. We think this is absolutely not true. If it were, Apple wouldn’t be where it is today. We just have to deliver the right tools to community owners, so they can do their jobs more efficiently and at the same time be able to be completely creative.
With that in mind, we don’t see the discussion in online communities as the most important part of online communities, but more the data being discussed. Skooppa will let site owners create any form of data they want. Skooppa as a platform will be an enabler of ideas, which will then create new knowledge and opinion.
User Content
User content is another key part, if not THE key part, to the success of any online community. User content makes up and forms an online community’s atmosphere. It is what brings in more users to share more knowledge and opinion. It is also what helps the knowledge and opinion lifecycle to spiral upwards and be positive (in most cases).
Skooppa will help users with adding content, especially with discussions, simply by being a fun piece of software to use.
Although we are going to aim at keeping our “proprietorshipness” in the background, we feel this one part of Skooppa must be a given. There must be a great discussion engine available for any site owner to use.
How any other content is created by the users of a site will be totally up to each site owner. Only the discussion engine will be a standard “direct content creation” system within Skooppa.
The Skooppa Network
Normally, online community owners are basically at the mercy of search engines to lead users to their sites to gain traction among users. As the Skooppa network grows, we will be able to give Skooppa site owners a second means to gain traction with users and help feed their needs for more information about their interest.
Unfortunately, how this will be done will be a very tight secret, until it is rolled out.
But just imagine you start a site about a certain topic and could have already thousands of users ready and waiting to be informed about your existence, only because they are also interested in what your site has to offer.
Obviously, we have to build the Skooppa network and get people to join. But, we are absolutely sure this is a great way for online communities to finally build on the greater potential they inherently have for everyone. The general sharing of knowledge and opinion.
We ask only one thing of the nice people interested in our future service. Please remember, the users of any system do not belong to anyone. A user is only one person and as site owners or even a platform creator like we’d like to be, we share their interest and also their time on site among other site owners or platform creators. If we, as online community owners and we as the creator of a platform, can accept this as a fact too, then nothing will hold us back. It puts the user in the right position and then we can work hard from there.
The Skooppa network will emphasize and catapult the world as a community!
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