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You may not be aware of it, but your website probably has a community: the people that read, utilize, and otherwise interact with your pages. They’re out there, and they’re talking. It’s up to you to figure out what they’re saying, what it means, and how you can use it to make your site better. Software engineer and online community veteran Ben Brown shows you how to creating a culture that encourages the kind of behavior you want to see and rewards users for their engagement.

Brown explains how to communicate with your visitors, and in doing so avoid easy mistakes (he has a few real-life examples), advocate on-topic discussion, and reach the point where users can police themselves. From what text you put on buttons to where you should put your mission statement, Brown illustrates how your online community is a creative force to be observed, reckoned with, and harnessed for mutual benefit.
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Talking about the importance of content on websites is definitely good and often useful, but what happens next — what do we do when the discussion’s over, and it’s time to get down to the actual work of improving information? In “Audit, Plan, Build, Grow: A Methodology for Content Strategy”, experienced content strategist Jeff MacIntyre explains the methodology behind organized, people-centric, and ultimately effective content strategy.

Thoroughly analyzing and understanding what’s there and adapting as necessary to content management systems, company hierarchy, and audience; these processes help us do more of the work we want to do, and do it well. Using Predicate, his content and editorial strategy consultancy, as a reference base, Jeff uses real-life examples to illustrate the importance of having a plan, and how it not only benefits both company and client, but paves the way for a bright content future.

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Amazon just announced CloudFront, a content delivery network that relies upon their amazing S3 storage product. S3 is used as the origin server and Amazon will then elastically distribute content to edge servers that are located in your user’s locale. Plans are in place for the US, Europe, Hong Kong and Japan.

Another amazing product from Amazon that is likely to shake up a number of markets.

Ever wonder how the social media gurus got to know so much? By making mistakes just like the rest of us. But thanks to a revealing guest article by David Sparks on Mashable.com the rest of us can spare ourselves some embarrassment.

The Biggest Mistakes Made by Social Media Gurus airs the confessions of  mavens like Deb Schultz, social media strategist for P&G, who admits to using too many bells and whistles on her site without finding out from customers what they really wanted.

Schultz admitted she should have spent more time talking with customers instead of adding more content to the site.

David Sparks and Dana Gardner, blogger for ZDNet, both own up to spending way too much time answering all the negative comments posted on their blog sites until they each realized they were wasting their time fighting a war that couldn’t be won against geeks drinking espresso all day and angrily chattering on all night.

“Going to the lowest emotional common denominator to me is an ineffective way of reaching that audience. I’d rather come up with valuable insightful fresh innovative content than appeal to angry white men sitting around computers that don’t have anything else to do,” Gardner said.

However, ignoring negative posts and annoying people can be a mistake, too, as Ross Mayfield, founder of SocialText, found out.

“You really want to engage with every conversation that relates with your brand,” Mayfield advised, “Even if you don’t want to necessarily draw attention to the existence of a competitor.”

It’s a balancing act, really, staying engaged with readers without the conversation degenerating into an on-line (and very public) argument. There is a debate among experts on the value of even allowing commenting on company blogs, but that’s a discussion for another post. One mistake I have made is not reading the post carefully before commenting. I didn’t bother to notice that the post was a month old and the topic had digressed into something else and long since died. So my comment just made me look late for the meeting and off-topic. All I could do at that point was hope no one cared enough anymore to read the post—but I would never count on that. Darn permalinks.

There are some mistakes pretty much everyone would agree should never, ever, be repeated. At least two of them Sparks mentions are Stalking women on Facebook–one of the top ten signs you could be a loser (though Stuart Alsop mentioned in the article seems okay)–and Accepting friend requests from people you barely know. Sometimes even perfectly nice people have way too much time to spend online and if you don’t know that before you become friends, there’s no way to “de-friend” them nicely later.

You can read more mistakes from the experts at Mashable.com. And feel free to share some of your own with us–just don’t forget about the permalinks.

This is a great conference. It’s great to be back in NYC. There is no place like NYC. The sights. The smells. Seeing my family. All great. Here is a sample of today’s sessions …

Keynotes: 

Tim O’Reilly: Web 2.0 is a data operating system; Work on stuff that matters; Create more value than you capture; Great potential in big problems; Vote: don’t let those who don’t participate pick our leadership. 

Clay Shirkey: Information OVERLOAD. New problem? Not really. Soon after Gutenberg revolutionized printing there were too many books in print for most people to read in a lifetime. This problem has been with us for about 500 years. We need a new perspective on data flow. We need better filters.

Cloud Panel :: 

An interesting discussion about what the cloud is. And isn’t. Best bits? Remember to consider scaling down when you are obsessed with scaling up or out. It’s always good to be as close to your end-users as feasible. When cpu’s are sold as a utility, coding practices will change lower utilization costs.

Digg Scaling :: Joe Stump

Stump Dump:

Scaling can cause severe hair loss.

Your mother lied: Share nothing. Share nothing architectures are the key to scaling out.

Decentralize; expect failure; just add boxes.

Cache forever; explicitly expire; develop a chain of responsibility.

Partition your data!

Joe Stump. Awesome.

Sequel to SQL

Whoa. As a (relational) database guy this talk was fascinating and scary. Relational databases don’t work in the cloud. Period. Geir explored plate spinning on EC2, Google’s BigTable, Amazon’s SimpleDB and 10gen’s Mongo data persistence platforms. It’s a different world now. “Eventually consistent” is my new, favorite term. Bottom line is we need to think about this problem from a new perspective and develop new solutions.

Scaling Meebo : Sandy Jen

The only women geek presenter so far. Sandy did a great presentation. Ironically, in my mind she was the geekiest as Meebo is a C/C++ application. She cautioned us to carefully decide when to be synchronous and when to be asynchronous. She confirmed a personal truism for me: Nothing simulates real life like real life. Load testing can provide valuable insights, but you don’t know if it’s going to work until you let your application loose. Also, look at alternative to Apache. lighttpd rocked their world. 

Alix Iskold :: Amazon Web Services

They rock. Why?

• Pay per use model
• Instant scalability
• Reliable/Redundant/Secure
• Simple REST/SOAP API
• Amazon’s Experience and Commitment (overlooked and unappreciated)

Google Chrome might seem like old news already, but based upon attendance at a bonus session this morning by Ojan Vafai, a developer from the Google Chrome team, there is a LOT of interest here at the conference. Recall that Chrome was released three short weeks ago!

Ojan described the motivation for Google to develop their own browser. Their developers were frustrated by the current state of browser stability and performance and the difficulty of building good web applications. They wanted and needed a stable application platform to develop and deliver great end-user applications. After surveying the current technologies they determined that the current providers of browsers were not keeping up with the needs of web applications. They decided to build their new browser on top of WebKit, Apple’s open source web browser engine.

Google’s plan for Chrome:

• Stability :: A browser that doesn’t crash. Period.
• Performance :: Browsers should load fast, be good citizens with respect to memory management, render html quickly and accurately and efficiently execute javascript.
• Enable Web Development :: Be compatible and consistent within standards and across platforms; provide good tools for developers.

Fraser Kelton gave an interesting talk on some ideas he has developed around some unintended side effects of this Web 2.0 thing. He outlined four trends that have the potential to create big problems for the adoption of new technologies. 

1. Open source and the commoditization of hardware: The costs of entry are so much lower today and as a result there are many, many, many new startups. Many of them are not good.
2. API’s and <blink>cloud computing</blink>: Small companies can stand on the shoulder’s of giants. They are trying to leverage existing innovation but most only offer a single “new” feature and since it is relatively easy to do, there are many copycats.
3. Blogs and aggregators: There is a tremendous increase in the velocity, frequency and volume of information. There is simply too much information about new companies to even attempt a thorough vetting.
4. Social features and read/write web: User generated content is a great thing, however, it does create a lock-in situation for many users. If you have been an avid user of Flickr and have built a network up around your photos you are unlikely to want to move to a new and better platform. Not a technical roadblock per se, but definitely a hindrance to innovation and new platforms in certain markets. Anyone up for developing a new and better photo sharing site?

Albert Wenger, a VC from Union Square Ventures gave a great talk on <blink>cloud computing</blink>. So what *is* cloud computing? A mere buzzword? The latest trend? Clearly there is something going on here. There was a huge public outcry when Dell attempted to copyright the phrase “cloud computing”. 

The concepts behind cloud computing have been around for over 40 years. John McCarthy, a computer scientist and inventor of Lisp stated in 1961:

“If computers of the kind I have advocated become the computers of the future, then computing may someday be organized as a public utility just as the telephone system is a public utility… The computer utility could become the basis of a new and important industry.”

The industry has touted utility computing and grid computing and neither technology was widely adopted. Virtualization may be the technology that will make cloud computing a reality. Tony Chung has a nice write up here.

Wenger defined four principles which define cloud computing for him:

1. No more machines! (Amazon’s EC2 is therefore not in the cloud)
2. Code over configuration (Cloud computing should not require the “arcane knowledge passed on by the secret society of sysadmins”)
3. Applications can scale without unreasonable demands on developers
4. Making it easy to bring web services together

I started out this morning at People Powered Products … but it wasn’t what I thought it was about. A quick permanent redirect across the hall landed me in Knowledge Sharing at Ideo presented by Doug Solomon and Gentry Underwood. Much more interesting for me. This talk outlined a year long project at Ideo to foster collaboration and knowledge sharing across the company. Knowledge workers face ambiguous and dynamic problems on a daily basis and must adapt and be innovative in real time. The goals of the project were to empower teams to learn from one another, connect geographically seperated offices and enable global collaboration. They came up with 7 lessons that are transferrable to other organizations:

1. Build pointers to people
2. Help people help themselves (wikis, portals)
3. Keep it simple and intuitive (wysiwyg, LDAP, auto-navigation)
4. Go where people already are (leverage existing blogs, email distros)
5. Reward individual participation
6. Aggregate the myriad of voices (self organizing streams of information)
7. Iterate early and often (Fail early and often to succeed quickly)

Cal Henderson over-delivered on his talk Scalable Web Architectures: Common Patterns and Approaches. My head is still spinning. Cal architected Flickr, a large scale kitten sharing website. You may have heard of it … details coming soon.