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March 10, 2007

let a thousand flowers bloom

I think I mentioned earlier that I am going to be building some websites for as-yet-unamed (doh! how long has that been on our to-do list?) collective of literary magazines. As part of that process I've been looking at open source content management systems like Plone, Drupal and Joomla, trying to decide which platform might work for my far-flung collection of peeps. (If anyone has had any experience with any of these tools feel free to let me know.)

Anyway, I bring this up because the pace at which enterprising ladies and gents are setting up their own a niche communitys (using one of the increasingly easy to install/use turn-key CMS's listed above) seems to increase with every passing week, the launches of entire (would-be) online communities now as easy as the launch of blogs or (reaching back in the crate) personal web pages.

(Pointless distinction alert: There are no any strictly-defined "personal webpages" left in the world that aren't in some way or another blogs.)

Take the Black Writers Network, which seems to be powered by Joomla. Heavily promoting the tschotske-making powers of Cafe Press, BWN seems interested in being a home away from home for the black self-publishing set. Still relatively ghost-towny, there doesn't seem to be much on it that didn't come out of the box with Joomla, meaning that once the admin (and there can easily be just one) has worked out the kinks of the install they can basically let the thing percolate in perpetuity, which, between low hosting costs and an admin gainfully employed, can be an actual long time.

It takes kind of a shit to handicap the prospects of completely harmless labors of love like BWN, but: the prospects for a site like BWN are hard to handicap these days. It costs so little to launch and maintain such sites that a dedicated admin willing to eat the hosting costs could maintain BWN indefinitely without quitting their day job. Ideally the point at which BWN requires full time attention is the point at which it (kind of) (maybe) (begins to suggest ways it) can support itself. (Someday.) That, of course, if the site can connect with enough of those self-publishy folks to last. Because sure: a thousand community-site flowers may now be able to bloom on any given, but mostly so that they can die and fertilize the next generation.

I want to write that people will set up Drupal communities the way they set up blogs, but, of course, that is bullshit. Besides the simple fact that the numbers don't work (it would be an online world full of corporations instead of users, each site "member" just another community), the peculiar temperament that makes you desperately want to host a party is not universally distributed among the species. (Forget about the skills.)

Posted by ebogjonson in internet tubes, the collective, on March 10, 2007 4:38 PM