Looking Backwards
We've all read summaries of 2005 and what's going to happen in 2006. It's a common theme amongst bloggers it seems.
I'm not going to take my turn though. This post is about why an earlier venture of mine (OurLittleNet) failed, prompted by an article I recently read - Getting it Right. Over future posts I'll look at how it could still be resurrected using some of the new developments that we've seen this year.
First though, did you see what is web 2.0 on del.icio.us? Rather than taking one person's word for it, they have the tools to track what all their users are talking about when they say Web 2.0.
I just view Web 2.0 as a synonym for "the latest trends" so I'm really pleased to see that so many things that I'm interested in are listed:
blog, social, software, tagging, rss
Hell, add CMS in there and those words define my life for the last 4-5 years.
Ever since CoverYourASP.com started I've been interested in online communities, and of course I now work for Telligent on Community Server (seems obvious that I would end up here in hindsight).
In between those two of course was Dozing Dogs CMS, now owned by Telligent. But that was only 12 months work and wouldn't have been possible without the 3 years I put into OurLittleNet (OLN).
OLN if you're not aware is a network of 1,600 online communities that service cities and metro areas. There is still no leader in this market, although there are dozens of smaller networks out there and thousands of one-off city web sites. Most are dead.
Strangely, there is still no effort from GAMY in this area. Which means that either there is no market..or.. umm.. what?
Everyone is concentrating on huge blog sites like MSN Spaces and MySpace, both of which are suffering from a backlash from parents and authorities (via apophenia)
Effective immediately, and over student complaints, the teens were told to dismantle their Myspace.com accounts or similar sites with personal profiles and blogs. Defy the order and face suspension, students were told 
Like the proverbial arrogant developer/entrepreneur I still think there's a market for a more family-friendly, city-based community site network. Why a network though? Just to make it easier/cheaper to promote and improve the business model.
So why did OLN fail? Perhaps it didn't fail, I just ran out of steam. Perhaps 3 years wasn't long enough? I think that stepping away from it for 12 months was good, because when I look at it now I'm seeing it as others do, not as the person who built it.
And a couple of things are wrong. One, the idea to share content amongst nearby cities is great if there is a lot of content being created in the cities, where you can pick some well-written articles with wider appeal and share them. It doesn't work if you only have 5 articles a week being published on 1,600 sites.
Why so little new content? As Google turned off the traffic hosepipe and the traffic/content decreased we shared more content which made Google view our network as a bunch of duplicate content web sites. Spammers to them. A vicious circle caused by those real SEO "optimizers" out there.
AdSense didn't exist in the early days of OLN either, so I tried to sell ads to local businesses. Highly targeted traffic, selling to people within a few miles of them, right? It worked, and made great money while I walked the streets and beat on doors. But finding sales people to reproduce it elsewhere proved very hard. most of the "part-time" sales people I found wanted the money without the work.
Blogs were another thing missing (and still missing). I added blogs when creating Dozing Dogs CMS from OLN, but never pushed the code back into OLN. Call them diaries/journals and I think my 34 year old mom with 2 kids (the demographic using OLN) would understand them, even if they visited the site to read them rather than use aggregators (I think the need to install an aggregator is what's stopping the widespread adoption of blogs/rss. I'm waiting for MSFT to fix this, then watch out. Blogs will explode like never before).
Lastly, I had more questions about categories than anything else. Luckily, others have already fixed this for me this year with the whole Folksonomy development. I'm into this in a big way and will post more about my views on Categories vs Tags soon.
There are some who think tags are just a new fad, but they probably haven't ever tried to build a complete set of global categories. OLN has 440 categories and 343 keywords today, and even with all sorts of optimizations and UI tricks it's still too hard for most people to use.
So, simplify UI, add blogs, revisit categories, use a new domain name and experiment with secret monetization plans and perhaps OLN2 will still rise from the dead. But this time it won't be me doing all the work!
ASP.NET 3.5 Web Hosting: 3 Months FREE + FREE Setup - CLICK HERE!