Making the site

Here’s a nice article by Fred Stutzman about social networks:

Transience in Social Networks, or How to Beat MySpace and Facebook

Some key tips he writes about:

“Find a niche and exploit it”

“Be geolocal.”

“Exploit a content area. Basically, find some content that people love and wrap a social network around it.”

My goal is not to beat MySpace or Facebook, but facilitate people to help the world in a better way. Still, I’d like Helpalot to be successful, so the tips Fred Stutzman writes about will be taken into account.

At the moment I have no geolocal home base, I probably need to pick a focus-point for this. I see two options: (more…)

My teacher Rob van Kranenburg pointed me to Wealth of Networks, by Yochai Benkler. You can download it for free.

Wealth of Networks:
How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

Here’s an update on the Helpalot project:

Project Planning

• Next week, I’m going to write down a detailed version of the concept.
• The week after that, I’ll define what needs to be in the test version.
• In May, I want to start working on the test version.
• In June, I’d like to start testing.

Tech

So I won’t be reïnventing the wheel by building the test version from scratch. I haven’t made a choice on what I will be using to build the test version. It will probably be Joomla!, Drupal or Ning.

Marketing

Reading both Free Prize Inside and All Marketers are Liars from Seth Godin, made me think about what story I’m telling with my project. Seth Godin says marketing is all about story telling. The stories need to be remarkable - worth making a remark about - so people will tell others about your story.

Story Focus

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A friend of a friend (thanks John!) made me this logo on paper. Going with the Helpalot - Lancelot connection, making a friendly knight.

I’d like to hear some feedback. Does this logo work for you?

Also, I set www.helpalot.org to redirect to helpalot.hku.nl, because the hosting on helpalot.hku.nl is from my school and can handle a lot of data and traffic.

On the Dutch blog of a fellow student, Maarten Mansszat, I found this nice link. It’s a lecture of David Weinberger on how to order information in a digital world.

http://webcast.oii.ox.ac.uk/?view=Webcast&ID=20051130_109

Abstract from site:

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