Library clips :: Spark social network and community on Clearspace :: October

October 22, 2007

Spark social network and community on Clearspace

Filed under: blogs, newsmaster, conversation

I posted on Spark open source instant messaging the other day, when I went to consult their help page, I got a pleasant surprise…it wasn’t a FAQ, it wasn’t a forum, it was a mixture of social networking and communities.

The Ignite Community uses Jive’s Clearspace service for forums and network blogs, I’ve posted on Clearspace before, but here is another look at a live example.

Community home page

- a list of community under community topics
- members
- tags
- polls
- What’s new stream with an RSS feed
(each piece of new content is identified by an icon; forum post, blog post, or new document…you can also limit the view to one of these content types…each new item has a link to the content source and the author)
- each content set on this homepage has a link to its own page

A selected community eg. Support

- this has sub-communities
- recent discussions (forum and blog posts)
- recent documents
- see just blog posts
- tag cloud
- top members

Also see a sub-community eg. Spark Support

Here is a random user profile.

- latest blog posts
- latest forum posts
- latest documents
- send an email
- send a private message
- lacks a comment wall
- tag cloud
- list of blogs this user owns
- RSS feed for this user

You can also have a watchlist to be updated on content of your choice.

Blogs

I tried to create a blog, but I couldn’t find how, I could only add a document or forum topic…when I add a forum topic it asks what community I want to add this to.

So I don’t really know how blogs fit into the scheme of things with Clearspace.

Perhaps each community has a few group blogs, and just like forums, when you add a new blog post, it asks which blog you would like to add it to…this means a blog is not personal, but confined to a community.

Perhaps each user has a personal blog, and when you add a post you can also decide if you want to send it to a community as well.

Perhaps a bit of both, each user can have a personal blog and send posts to community pages, and a community may also have resident blogs.

I see this as social network blogging co-existing with communities.

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