I posted a whole intro entry laying it out -- it's pretty much a group blog where AIM & AOL folks who work on community and social media products will be talking about (wait for it) community and social media topics -- with each other, with our users, and with the rest of the industry and the world.
I'm serving as editor for the whole shooting match, and for launch, we've got 5 categories, each serving as its own blog (so you can go to the top level and see everything, or dive down into a particular category and see just that topic's content):
1. The AIM Buddy Blog, focused on AIM and social messaging
2. The AIM Pages Blog, looking at AIM Pages Profiles and the world of social networking
3. The Community Info Blog, to support the users of our community products (like chat and message boards)
4. The Marvelous Mob, talking about community moderation, development and enforcement
5. The Social Media Mess, which is my catch-all for social media and community topics
We're going to be consolidating the existing AIM Buddy Blog, AIM Pages Blog, and the Community Info Blog into the new blog structure, so they'll be up as archives until we can transition all the content we want to copy over, at which point we'll redirect the old URLs.
So What's That Mean for Magic Smoke?
Well, first off, this Journal isn't going anywhere. I'm going to be keeping it and keeping it active, though being realistic, I'll be posting less often, and when I do, it will be focused exclusively on AOL Journals and AOL Journaler topics. Things like industry musings, conference notes, the busted for blogging stuff, etc. will all be part of the Social Media Mess.
On AOL Journals vs. Blogsmith
Since one of the main purposes of the Social Media Blog is to help get more AOL and AIM folks participating out in the blogosphere in a coherent, structured way, it demanded a group blogging solution with the right mix of categories and features.
At this stage of the game, AOL Journals just isn't the right platform to do that with, so we went with Blogsmith, the blogging platform that powers all the Weblogs, Inc blogs (like Engadget, TMZ, and the AOL Fanhouse).
As to the question of, "If Blogsmith is so good, why not just roll it out to consumers?"-- this is an idea that comes up as a rumor from time to time; I honestly have no insights into this and no idea if this would ever happen, though I'll tell you that for our build, it took a full-time developer versed in Javascript, CSS and PHP about a month to build out the blog, with ample help from the other developers (it was her first full-on build -- thanks, Amy!), so it's not something that regular, non-coding folks (I include myself) can play with.
In any case, we're going to keep working on enhancing AOL Journals -- it's going to be an interesting summer.
One thing Journals users should note is that the Social Media Blog, out of the gate, does not have AOL Alerts integrated on the page -- it's got feeds you can subscribe to, and we'll be working on ways to provide feeds, feed updates via e-mail, and Alerts in a unified way, but for right now, you can try subscribing to an Alert that will tell you when the feed updates with a new entry.
So that's where we are -- if you're interested in wonky discussions about the future of social media and online community, come on by, and I hope you'll root for me as I work on getting more voices from inside AOL out into the broader blogosphere and world. And remember, I'll still be blogging here and reachable at
Thanks -- Joe
5 comments:
Neat. It's definitely something I'm interested in. I think this little enclave of AOL Journals does have some great content to offer to the greater blogosphere.
Anyway, I'll check it out, and good luck with the new project.
-Dan
http://journals.aol.com/dpoem/TheWisdomofaDistractedMind/
Cool and thank you for the combined feed on the new blog. I figured the cryptic project was the myAOL offering so the new blogging effort was a surprise. The AOL alert feed URL is mighty interesting.
Hey Joe,
Few thoughts:
1. I hope Blogsmith's platform works better for you than it does for the poor folks over at Styledash. Their comment section has been a mess for months on end.
2. The old AOL "add to alerts" function isn't available on the new platform. That's a shame because the RSS feeds aren't very good. I used to follow the Cooler, but I haven't gotten more than one feed update a week, even though I know they do more posts than that.
3. Since there doesn't seem to be any plans for an AOL 10.0 can we assume that the AOL client software will soon be a thing of the past?
4. Last-- I tried to subscribe to the new Social Media blog using that Feedburner window in the entry there. It brings you to a window that asks you to do a word verification. I tried 10 times and the thing isn't reading right at all. (I don't mistype THAT often!)
There is something wrong with the combined feed. I subscribed in bloglines and it's blank, no updates shown. What's curious is that each of the category feeds works fine in bloglines. I dropped the combined feed into the myAOL reader and it works there.
The combined feed is now working in Bloglines! It's showing the blogsmith logo as well. Branding.
Post a Comment