Documenting Success

Community tips from a person behind MetaFilter No comments yet
Published on May 24th, 2007

I’ve been looking for articles and blog posts with helpful tips on how to build a community, for my fledgling site Octop.us and I’ve stumbled onto this great article by Matt Haughey, a man behind MetaFilter.com.

In the article “Some Community tips for 2007″ Matt shares some of the things that helped him turn MetaFilter into what it is now. I gotta say, some of those gave me some pretty interesting ideas for what to do with my website, and I can’t wait to start implementing them. Here’s my favorite one:

If I had to give a reason why most newspaper blogs are filled with cranky screeds posted anonymously, I’d have to say having a generic blank comment form is key. Most every community that I contribute to offers a comprehensive user profile/history page, letting members customize to their hearts content and allow their profile to reflect their personality. When I think of mainstream news, TV, and newspaper sites trying to solicit comments from readers, I’ve yet to find something close to even a basic community site. The New York Times requires me to register to read most stories, but their blog system gives me a blank generic comment form when I want to comment on a blog post.

(Read more…)

Introducing … Octop.us! 2 comments
Published on May 20th, 2007

It feels really weird.

After so many nights spent creating this, it’s almost unreal that I’ve finally reached a point where the site is online, fully functioning, and I’m writing these words on my blog, finally ready to unleash my creation at the unsuspecting world

It wasn’t too long ago that I thought I would never be done with it. Time and again, just as I thought – this is it, I got all the annoying little bugs that prevent me from going live, I would discover something else that was so small and annoying, yet unacceptable to be in the final version.

But I did it. I finally did it!!! The site is live and ready to go and I’m just so damn happy!

The site was born out of a conversation I had with a friend of mine about restaurants. He mentioned that if you don’t have a clue about any of the wines on the list, getting SECOND cheapest one is a bad idea. Restaurant people know our psychology – we avoid the cheapest stuff because well, no one wants to look cheap – and don’t want to go for too expensive if we don’t know what it is. So more often that not, we go for the second cheapest one. Restaurants know this, and that’s why they put their crappiest stuff in that spot.

After hearing that, I thought to myself.. “Wow, that was pretty neat! I wonder if there’s a site that has all that useful little tips about pretty much anything in life…” I didn’t find such a site because it didn’t exist, and the rest, as they say, is history.

I don’t want to spend much longer talking … So without further ado, may I present to you – a site whose slogan is “Tips on ANYTHING” – here it is: