People Connection Looks to the Future

Hi folks -- As I've been threatening to do, here's a photo from the morning after last, um, month's, launch of the new People Connection redesign:

The People Connection Headset Crew look to the future: Back row: Amy, Kelly, Jen; Front row: John, Jason & Chris.

All the folks in the picture had been glued to their phone headsets for about nine hours straight on the previous day's launch conference call. And this was just some of the content programming team -- it was truly a global effort, with a lot of different groups involved.

Since I did not have to be on the launch call, I took to calling them the Headset Crew.

Now, in tandem with the redesign, we're also trying out a bit of a new strategy: Rolling out new niche community sites to cover (the en vogue term is "superserve") areas that people are interested in.

The concept isn't really new, though we've got more community and social media tools available to us now (including blogs and group blogs, social profiles, etc.)

One thing that's important to note, is that although group blogs are at the core of each community, they're not just group blogs -- blogs just happen to be the most convenient way to publish and manage all the separate elements of an online social community (including boards, polls, chats, and galleries), plus you get all that great bloggy stuff like living, searchable archives, feeds and comments.

Here's what we've got currently:

* Animal Hubbub -- Replacing the previous Awwwww Factor blog and Pets community hub, it's a group blog that focuses on furry and not-so-furry pets.

Also, AOL Journalers should check out the blogroll links to see some familiar names.

* Comics Alliance -- Considering that even my mom called me to ask me about Captain America's demise, perhaps comics books aren't that niche any more, but this is a community built around comic books, graphic novels, and the fandom associated therein.

* QueerSighted -- Editor Kenny Hill takes his previous Worth Repeating blog and has mashed it up with the old Gay & Lesbian area on AOL to make a Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual & Trangender (GLBT) community group hub.

* Lastly, as blogger John mentioned, there's Ficlets, which is a niche community built around microfiction -- Really, really short fiction. Like paragraph-short. This one is even more notable since it's built around the ideas of social collaboration and serial writing, and the group blog component is only a small piece of it, so it's really illustrative of the notion of using the right tool for the right job.

I'll blog about it more (it's been getting some positive writeups lately), especially after I get a chance to play around.

Thanks -- Joe

Tags: aol, people connection, niche communities, group blogs, queersighted, animal hubbub, ficlets, comics alliance, headset crew, superserve