Here Comes The Neighborhood...

Friendship is good.

Photo by alex de carvalho. (License: Creative Commons Attribution)

Building communities is a tricky task, especially online. All hosts can really do is provide an environment with an ideal set of benefits, and ideal set of guidelines, and hope the right sorts of people show up. Whether the community flourishes or fizzles from there is a product of hard work from community members, hard work from staff, and just plain luck.

That 99 out of 100 online communities devolve into anarchies or ghost towns is usually a result of those communities' guidelines not keeping up with usage or people just plain losing interest. Thankfully, we've been able to avoid this fate at Newsvine by concentrating on what makes this site different: engaging conversation. Yes, many will argue that especially in the middle of politics season, people aren't always as nice as they should be, but if you compare the average comment thread at Newsvine to the average thread at Digg, Topix, The Huffington Post, or almost any other participatory news site, you'll generally find the discourse here measures up very well. People talking to people is what we care about. Not people typing into text boxes.

Being part of the msnbc.com family has already yielded many benefits in the several months since we started working together. We've gotten two of our members on national TV. We've had great Q&A sessions with the likes of Chuck Todd, Richard Engel, and others. We're mentioned on the NBC Nightly News from time to time. And msnbc.com, with its 35 million or so monthly unique users, continues to send a lot of new people to some of the best articles Newsviners write, as a result of efforts such as the Gateway groups, ConsumerVine and Gut Check America - just to name a few.

Part of Newsvine staff's charge, however, is to get msnbc.com's users more involved in their news site of choice; whether it be msnbc.com or Newsvine. This is a bit of a tricky proposition, because msnbc.com already has a ton of users, but they just have no means by which to talk to each other. Newsvine is a natural arena in which to encourage this sort of community building, but at the same time, one could argue that funneling people en masse into Newsvine would mess with the community dynamic. For this reason, we've been building systems that will accommodate community activity on msnbc.com and on Newsvine, such that we can see which implementation works best for Newsvine users, msnbc.com users, and staff.

Some things will work well (see NBC reporter Q&As hosted on Newsvine) and some things won't (see out-of-context questions posted as articles). The only way we can maximize what works well and minimize what doesn't is for you to give us feedback. If you have an idea for a feature or if you don't like the way something we launch is turning out, please write to us. Anytime you use the Contact Newsvine form, the entire staff sees your email so it's generally more effective than writing a public article that we may or may not see.

The newest thing we've launched -- just last week -- is a new "Discuss This on Newsvine" button which now appears on all msnbc.com stories. To be honest, we didn't expect more than a few clicks a day on these buttons as generally "Seed Newsvine", "Digg This", and every other social networking button you see on the web have very low clickthrough rates, but so far we're getting a lot more than that. The result has been a few msnbc.com stories a day receiving hundreds of comments apiece. This is a good thing, of course, because it proves out the theory that plenty of msnbc.com users are interesting in discussing stories, but it's potentially a bad thing because as we all know, when new users come en masse to a Newsvine thread, they aren't always aware of how we do things around here. We were all new at one time. Please welcome in our new visitors as you would a new guest to your own cocktail party, with diplomacy and patience. We hope that the Newsvine community puts its best foot forward when receiving new participants into the collective discussion.

There are several things we're going to do already to help ease potential problems with these sorts of things. The first will be to add a "Greenhouse" designation to the tops of new users' comments. In doing this, we hope to make it more clear, on first glance, who is a new user and who has been around awhile. The second is to remove the ability for NBC/MSNBC/Newsvine staff to appear on the leaderboard.

Thanks to everyone for their continued patience and stewardship as we fix bugs and build out more features, and once again, never hesitate to write us with suggestions or concerns.

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