I was browsing through The Washington Post today and came across this article in the entertainment section, about a site that is somewhat near-and-dear to my heart.
It's a dilemma: WB and UPN cruelly schedule "Gilmore Girls" to air at the same time as "Buffy the Vampire Slayer." An elaborate scheme to tape one show while watching the other fails in the jury-rigged setup of television, VCR and cable. The solution: Surf over to www.televisionwithoutpity.com...
Now, substitute Fox for UPN, Smallville (just for Lex Luther, you know) for BtVS, and 24 for Gilmore Girls, and you're at the dear-to-my-heart point. It was the mentions on a few blogs around here that got me hooked on 24 in the first place; I didn't watch it last season. Now I'm hooked, thanks to being caught up on season 1 on TWoP. But that is not the point of this post.
The author of the Washington Post article, Barbara Martinez, makes some points about online communities in the article. She starts by calling TWoP a community, which is great except that it might be too broad; a site that "hosts" communities might be better, as TWoP is as much an entertainment site as a community. But in terms of a site that delivers high-quality content that keeps visitors returning--TWoP does a great job. And as visitors continue to visit, your community develops.
You do have these friendships and this community that forms around something like 'Buffy,' " [...] "We live in a generation that is more isolated than previous generations and . . . the Internet is a sort of town hall water cooler. ..."
I am noting this simply for its relevance in terms of building loyalty to a site; intranet and KM systems need this sort of interesting and useful content to build readership and buy in. While this is an obvious point, illustrating it in terms of a site that both attracts viewers and builds community (beyond the "comment here" functions on a regular news site like WP.com that clearly has high readership but little sense of community and ownership) is a good mental exercise.
