In comments on my “recent piece”:/2006/09/11/cultanthorg-skulking-about-the-anthropological-noosphere/ on “cultanth.org”:http://culanth.org some people have pointed out the website’s many problems. I personally think some of the problems with this site have to do with issues that plague all attempts to build community like this: if you built it, they may not come. That is to say, when building things like forums or group blog sites it may simply be the case that all the enthusiasm that people have for ‘making anthropology public’ or ‘exploring new forms of community’ deflate pretty quickly when it comes time to actually write something. We’ve certainly seen this at Savage Minds, where currently have 8 Minds and 478 posts by them — 354 of these are by Kerim and I alone, and my own contributions more than exceed the total posted by every other current Mind combined. Other sites with a ‘hard core’ of contributors — “anthropology.net”:http://anthropology.net/ and “ye olde LiveJournal community”:http://community.livejournal.com/anthropologist/ come to mine — demonstrate that it takes not just enthusiasm, but persistence and commitment, to build an anthropological noosphere.
Even SM’s struggles to keep postings regular — which we should all feel proud about, by the way — compare favorably to other failed attempts to start group blog sites such as “anthroblogs.org”:http://anthroblogs.org and the “anthrocommons.org”:http://www.anthrocommons.org/ which failed to achieve critical mass for a variety of reasons. I would hasten to add that I lay none of these at the door of the personalities of the people involves, who I am sure are all very nice. It is a strange mix of chance and design that lets some online communities flourish. Why Worlds of Warcraft and MySpace instead of EverQuest and Friendster? There are many reasons, but I think at some level these things are random.
But then there are other reasons that sites fail to draw serious traffic. In the case of our official AAA websites that reason is, to my mind, lousy design plain and simple. The current AAA website is truly amateurish (although a new one is supposedly in the works which will hopefully be better). AnthroSource’s search function is so lousy the wider community created work-around solutions like “greasemonkey scripts”:/2006/06/23/a-greased-up-platypus-for-anthrosource-google-synergy/ and “browser plugins”:http://mycroft.mozdev.org/download.html?name=anthrosource.net&sherlock=yes&opensearch=&submitform=Search. I feel like one of us should get up at the next AAA meetings and pull a Steve Ballmer on them: “Developers developers developers.”
I think the race to the bottom has been won, however by the new “searchable catalog of 2006 AAA meeting sessions”:http://www.aaanet.org/mtgs/search/search.cfm, which will not actually tell you the date and time for sessions. I know — it seems incredible. Take a look at the “session I will be giving a paper at”:http://www.aaanet.org/mtgs/search/showSessionInfo.cfm?proposal_type=non_invited_session&type=s&id=2147 — anyone interested in the session can find such earth-shattering information as the fact that we will have a slide machine in the room with us and that the panel will be 1.75 hours long. But which 1.75 hours in particular? It’s true that you can find this information in the ‘preliminary search results’ (which are unlinkable and hence unshareable because of a lack of a static URL). Why not include the date and time in the session info? After all, you can figure out the length of a session is you know the date and time, but not the other way around. The mind simply boggles. I’ve emailed AAA’s IT Director about this problem, and he told me they decided that “only the fields that were felt to be most important” came up on this page. Am I completely off-base here is assuming that the vast majority of people searching for sessions are less interested in the AV needs of the people giving papers than they are in trying to figure out when the damn thing is supposed to actually occur? If you agree with me please say so in the comments and perhaps we can explore some sort of letter or something to get this changed.
So in sum, cultanth.org is walking a gauntlet that many have walked before. Given the AAA’s consistent ability to provide rock-bottom performance in the Internet space, I don’t think cultanth is really capable of sinking to the bottom of the barrel. But triggering ‘take-off’ (as if websites were New Nations) is an occult art that few anthropology websites have managed. There is not a lot of middle in the anthropological noosphere yet so perhaps cultanth, with its mix of user-created content and editorial-created information can break new ground.
One can hope that the pairing with one of anthropologies premerier journals and this site will amount to something. I believe the goal is to exceed the space offered by the journal. The opportunities are there, it is now our (the journal staff, readers, authors) responsibility to make it relevant. Give things some time… Even Penny Arcade wasn’t born overnight, and nor was World of Warcraft (games are … of a particular interest to me). Certainly it’s a game developers greatest nightmare when folks get to see a “beta” version of a game, and http://www.culanth.org is definitely still in beta.
Well in WoW’s case (and in the case of many other ‘permanent beta’ sites) ‘beta’ just means ‘advertising for a final pay version of the site’ whether ‘pay’ means ‘acquisition by Yahoo’ or ‘monthly fees for playing’. The WoW beta rocked, and WoW staued in ‘beta’ for an incredibly long time.
This is the problem with declaring a website ‘beta’ at its most crucial stage — up-take by early adoptors and the word of mouth that results. There used to be a long entry about this somewhere on 37Signals or something but I can’t find it now. It’s got to look good and work reasonably well right out of the gate, or else it needs to be kept under wraps.
I too hope that pairing a well-known journal with a website is a good idea, but you really can’t ride on CA’s reputation, mostly because the space you are moving into is so different from the one that CA operates in… but overall this is not to take anything away from you guys, it’s just to speculate on what might happen…
It helps being Blizzard too.
I don’t think keeping culanth.org under wraps is/would have been a good idea. We’d have had to keep the same old site (http://www.aaanet.org/sca/ca) in the mean time, and with so many things changing, it just didn’t seem to make sense.
Waiting until its all done isn’t always the best idea, then you don’t get much feedback till it’s too late. Then again, Apple likes your philosophy, and perhaps we’ve pulled a M.S. Vista. I’ll hope not.
AFter having read the responses from the site’s organizers, I actually feel a lot better about what they’re doing — they just need to get cracking on content. In my own experiences with trying to build a critical mass at a Big-Name Old-Money Foundation, I’ve found first-hand how difficult it can be to “sell” online community to academics and professionals — especially when the rewards are quite ephemeral and difficult to quantify. Sure, engaging in a discussion about the latest anthropological ideas might be personally rewarding, but will it get me tenure? Will it get my manuscript published? Will it get my research funded?
I’m not saying that culanth.org should do all that — and I certainly (and perhaps obviously) don’t believe SM should do all that — but we’re early adopters (in the anthro world, at least). Most of the SM’ers were playing around with this stuff just for fun before we ever decided to make it part of our anthropological “work”. Becaus of that, we’ve been willing to put in a lot of work, both in writing but also in thinking about direction, seeking out interesting guests and new members, identifying interesting topics to discuss, working out how to best organize and present this material, spreading the word about the site, and so on — as opposed to, say, AnthroCommons, which seems to have been put up and left to sink or swim. I mistook culanth.org’s unfinishedness for a lack of that work, so some of my earlier criticisms were unfounded. I am hoping that they’ll have learned something from both AnthroCommons and SM — and that they have a few ideas of their own that *we* can learn something from.
I think it _is_ interesting to compare them to other attempts to create anthro-centric websites because there _is_ a history there for those of us who know it.
I wish them well but agree with oneman — it is one thing to fear ‘keeping it underwraps’ for too long, but another to launch the site (unofficially or no) with a colorscheme that is almost enough to make the eyes bleed. It fails to establish the site’s ‘brand’ as being related to Cultural Anthropology The Journal in look and feel (as the old SCA site does) — there are little things like that that would really help. I understand that it is hard to time the release of these things, but I agree with Oneman: at this stage it is too easy for the average reader to confuse lack of polish with lack of ability and that’s not the message you want to send at this stage of the game, I think.
Just for the record: I\’ve written 20 more posts than Rex. But whose counting? 🙂
Seriously though – it is hard work. But I also think we should look at the number of comments we\’ve had on those posts. It takes a lot to build a community!
Kerim makes a good point — SM has 528 posts (including all guest bloggers, etc. etc.) but over FOUR THOUSAND comments — it’s the community’s ability to enlighten, entertain, and enrage each other that ensures that SM keeps getting read and written.
so who’s in third place? 😉 (it ain’t me…)
I certainly agree that it isn’t the volume of posts that makes the difference (though filling in the dead air time is obviously crucial to keeping people interested) but the proof is in the comment pudding…
I also think, apropos of CulAnth.org, that “building a virtual community” (or even an anthropological noosphere) should not be the goal. I think the blog format, as we have discovered in various ways, facilitates only a narrow band of possible interactions. There have to be other ways if we want our technophobic colleagues to participate
Here is my idea du jour…
1. new structures for responding to/evaluating a text–ie. more than just followed by . Again, much depends on what authors might perceive as valuable, and I would suspect that it would be more likely that “workshopping” would be more valuable than having to endlessly respond to questions about a published article (I know I would give up after about a week). How about a system where the editors pick articles that are worth publishing–but don’t make the cut, and that the authors are willing to have “workshopped” and do that on the website. I can even imagine a kind of “submit your article to be workshopped” kind of thing…. and a list of possible papers that you could sign up to respond to. It doesn’t have to be fully public, people could sign up to be workshoppers.
apropos of strategies for building a blog readership: this list has lots of good suggestions, most of which SM has followed already
Oh also — I forgot to mention this but must give props to “Matter Out Of Place”:http://www.matteroutofplace.org/ as well, who are doing good stuff but didn’t get listed in the post above.
I liked the comments on SM so much I subscribed to the comments feed. But I quit that a while ago because of the spam. There’s a limit to the invitations to nefarious porn a guy can handle. Reading about feasibility one minute and farm animals the next made for an interesting community though – like GTA:Stanford.
Tim — are you maligning our new content strategy? Wait til we unveil our new slogan: “Come for the incisive commentary on neo-liberalism, stay for the animal porn!”
Sorry about that. After working for a while, Akismet seems to be flaky this past month. Hopefully it will be fixed. Still, I prefer to use a system which lets through some spam that has to be deleted manually over one that blocks lots of legitimate comments which have to be approved manually (as was the case with Spam Karma).