Wednesday 29th July 2009 by Stuart Glendinning Hall
Why are profiles important?
If a member decides not to complete their profile then they’ve chosen to be relatively anonymous, whether they know it or not. But if as community manager you have a large percentage of members that are anonymous this will obviously negative impact on the quality of conversations. Conversely if you have a community where most members have a rich profile which they keep up to date then it’s likely to result in positive conversations. And positive conversations sustained over time help sustain a successful online community.
I recently bought a neat little Netbook to use as a sofa companion whilst tolerating various abysmal American drama shows. It runs Ubuntu, the geek's choice of operating system, and although my fingers are probably built more for a full-size keyboard, it's a very decent little thing overall.
The job of the community manager is not an easy one. He or she has to juggle competing internal cultures of IT, senior management, and the community itself in order to deliver results. Results in terms of engaged, active discussions as opposed to corporate generated content which is typical of traditional websites. At SiftGroups we recognise how difficult this balancing act is.
You'll almost certainly have read by now that 
At SiftGroups we’re compiling a glossary of terms that we use and terms that we avoid. How we all describe people has a direct bearing on how we treat them – and that certainly applies to the world of computers and the Internet. In everyday conversations the word ‘user’, if used at all, is usually in the context of abuse – such as ‘drug user’. So why is this the term that’s applied to all of us the moment we get near a computer?
Not so many years ago, when for most companies the web was little more than a way to publish a brochure without paying for the printing, the subject of 'uptime' tended to be of interest only to the big players - online banking, eBay, Amazon, the BBC and so on. These were true 24x7 operations with money, market share and reputation at stake if their service went offline.