Related Publications

Community Building on the Web: Secret Strategies for Successful Online Communities
- Amy Jo Kim, 1997
- This was the canonical reference when it came out, and some of the lessons have aged well, but most need serious updating. For example, Social Networks didn’t exist at the time. I’ve discussed my project with Amy Jo, where I floated the idea that my book might be the logical ‘sequel’ to her original. She was delighted and offered for me to re-use any material (with credit) that I would find useful. I will definitely take her up on that offer.
Online Communities: Designing Usability and Supporting Sociability
- Jenny Preece
- TBD
MySpace Marketing: Creating a Social Network to Boom Your Business
- Sean Percival (TBP)
- TBD
Marketing to the Social Web: How Digital Customer Communities Build Your Business
- TBD
Building Virtual Communities: Learning and Change in Cyberspace
- Eds: Renninger & Shumar
- TBD
- Collected Papers
Cultivating Communities of Practice
- Wenger
- TBD
- Not online focused
Design for Community
- Powazek
- Cookbook and Interviews
Designing for the Social Web
- Joshua Porter, New Riders, 2008
- Cookbook and Interviews
- An excellent new book in the space. It contains about 25% (much of the high-level design approach) of the content I was originally planning for Context is King, so I can now include that content by summary/reference and expand on the detailed use-cases instead. He is a User Interface designer by trade, and focuses mostly on how community content is presented. My intention is to go deeper than this skin-deep approach and provide a more mechanism/theory based approach leveraging my 30+ years building online communities. His presentation is also generally optimistic and doesn’t contain many warnings. He provides no end-to-end site-wide design examples.
The Virtual Community: Homesteading on the Electronic Frontier
- Howard Rheingold, 1994
- The oldest book in the category. Mostly historical and descriptive instead of prescriptive.