content

News International’s decision to start charging for their online newspapers has led to a lot of debate: will this save The Times, and the rest of the Murdoch stable, from financial disaster, or consign them to oblivion by driving away human eyeballs and search-engine spiders?

I used to have a colleague who constantly worried about “getting all the ducks in a row”, by which he meant, I think, knowing what the elements of the task were and tackling them in the right order.

We talk a lot about community and community management, blogging and content-sharing, but while the sexy stuff is important, don’t forget the old-fashioned arts of editing and publishing when you’re planning and developing the inhouse parts of your website.

When a membership organisation or specialist magazine upgrades its web presence, it frequently concentrates on the impact of the new interactive functionality. That’s hardly surprising: opening itself out to community demands new skills, new habits of mind, and a new business model. But, while planning a community launch to produce lots of user-generated content and lots of ROI, don’t forget to spring-clean the copy you generate in-house too.

Recently one of the Community Champions in a community I manage came forward to suggest that we link to a controversial video circulating on the internet. She approached the community team in private, in the separate Community Champions area of the discussions, as she was not yet certain that it was appropriate to place the video into the public-facing area.