6/5: Richard Anderson, VillageSoup.com

Richard Anderson joins us for breakfast by Skype to tell us about his project, VillageSoup.com.

Anderson says newspapers have to expand to become community hosts. To understand what he means, think of the difference between a lecture and a trade show and how differently you would organize each. If you were organizing a lecture, you'd get a big hall with a stage and lots of seats, a podium, a microphone, maybe some special lighting. Everything would be set up to focus attention on the presenters and separate them from the audience. If you were organizing a trade show, you'd arrange for lots of booths in a common hall, chairs more dispersed and arranged for numerous simultaneous small conversations and just plain resting between visits, maybe a few larger spaces set aside for feature presentations. You'd create a much more interactive, fluid space which exhibitors and visitors alike would customize—exhibitors with their various displays, visitors with their different patterns of movement and attention throughout the exhibit hall.

We can see the same distinctions between newspapers and real community websites. Newspapers follow the lecture model:

• main speakers (the journalism staff)
• passive listeners and underwriters (readers and sponsors),
• fixed presentation stage (the printed paper).

Community websites (at least the juicy participatory ones we're trying to create) can follow the trade show model:

• shifting roles: an exhibitor may take a break from her booth and walk around for an hour to learn from other exhibitors. A visitor may strike up a conversation with a vendor and find himself pitching his own business to the vendor. Likewise on the community website, you may go from a reader to a writer, a learner to a teacher, in a second. An advertiser may also jump into the conversation, or may just sit back and learn from the chatter among other readers about her services. Everyone is a partner, able to participate in a number of ways.
  
• instant interaction: Q&A is not a separate time at the end or a limited space on page 3. Interaction is everywhere, all the time!
  
• less control of message: the trade show creates a space where a lot of talk takes place that may not fit under the narrow definition of the show's mission but which serves as community glue. There are also a lot more people deciding what to talk about, and they may talk about everything, not just the highlights preferred by the editorial board or Chamber of Commerce.
  

To make a "virtual community expo" like this work, Anderson says you need to be an expert on your community while remaining a peer and partner. You have to be able to see the big picture, but you still stand in the place where you live.

Worried about that message-control thing? Don't be: remember that trade shows work even with competing products and services on display, even with some vendors talking smack about other vendors in the hall. We can compete and disagree and still thrive.

Anderson echoes Matt Thompson's comment yesterday: Attitude is more important than technology!

Some business nuts-and-bolts: Anderson finds a key to VillageSoup.com's success is letting businesses post whatever and whenever. He has 300 businesses that pay $19.95 a week (that's $1000 a year per biz!) for the privilege of posting items to front page BizOffers® column. Heck of a deal for instant interactive ads that no other medium can offer.

6/4 evening: Building and Engaging Community... with Folklore?

Michelle again mentions folklore: fascinating word, and apt! Folklore is the stuff we tell each other, the stories that move through and fix themselves in the collective consciousness organically. Folklore reinforces community. If journalists hop online from the mainstream media but still turn to their same old Rolodex of sources, they may be failing to engage the community.

Online citizen journalism works differently. If it works within Michelle's folklore paradigm (and perhaps I overtag it as a paradigm -- what do you think?), our form of journalism finds its stories in what people are talking about before the media get to them. We tell our version of those stories, and then leave the door open for others to add to and remake those stories and tell their own stories on top of it all. That's the interactive community-building folklore that can happen online.

Now maybe my kind of blogging fits here too. At the Kiwanis meeting in Madison right before the conference, Charlie Stoneback said that my blog puts big stories in a local perspective that no one else gives. Who else talks about the farm bill or the presidential race or the cyclone in Burma in terms of Madison, South Dakota? Well, we do. My blog does. Folklore is about local events and mores, but it also reaches out to the stories of the larger world to put them in our own terms. Folklore isn't just local tales. It is the stories we tell to make sense of our world, the whole world.

6/4 small group: Chris Naff on Coaching, Changing the World

Chris Naff, HumanKind Media

• "media for the global citizen" reads her logo
• [CAH] interesting slogan to put in the context of a conference on placeblogging.
• [CAH] Can we be "hyperlocal" and "global" citizens at the same time?
  
• [CAH] Can we establish a sense of community with all these people we connect with online and with the people we see at the grocery store every day?
• [CAH] Will local community and dispersed community have the same qualities?
  
• Chris wants to change the world [my kind of goal!]
• Go beyond the crime and violence; do stories about people making positive change.
• Community participants needs lots of coaching
  

6/4 small group chat: Michelle Ferrier

Michelle Ferrier, Ph.D., proprietor/managing editor, MytopiaCafe.com, Daytona Beach, FL:

• Community calendar is the "gateway drug" on MytopiaCafe.com: it's the easiest feature for new users to use, introduces them to putting content online, inclines them to go further.
• Photos are usually the next thing users start posting [everybody loves pictures!]
• Stories are the hardest to get from participants [remember what Mary Turck said about how skittish people are about getting negative feedback from their writing?]
• 75% of the MytopiaCafe audience is women. The community is much more social and inviting than the forums on the associated/sponsoring newspaper site, where you get the typical hot-air insult contests [just like the KELO and Sioux Falls paper fora]