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.

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!

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.

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 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.

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…