John Clayton's Blog

For five months now I’ve been meaning to blog about Chris Anderson's discussion of social networking. Anderson, the editor of Wired Magazine, co-founder of booktour.com, is a man whose Internet instincts I trust. He believes that social networking – the polite term for “Facebook, MySpace, and all those sites” – is actually useful, and even beneficial to society (though maybe not in current form):

social networking to me means the tracking of individual preferences and behavior and giving users the ability to draw upon implicit or explicit connections between them and other users to do something useful

and

I think focused sites that serve niche communities will extract the best lessons from Facebook and MySpace and offer better social networking tools to the communities they already have.

Actually for the first few months I was just thinking about Anderson’s ideas. For the last couple of months, I’ve been playing with them.



The results are here at “Planet Red Lodge,” the MySpace of a tiny Montana town. Can the small town use social-networking sites to improve the existing bonds of community? (Does it need to?) If so, how? The questions are open for the network to debate.

One thing I’ve learned is that on a social network, constant new activity begets more new activity. So I’ll make the suggestion here: if you’re curious about the town or the site, go visit, sign up, post a photo, start a blog... maybe you, too, will be discovering a new planet.

I'm always interested in feedback, via info at johnclaytonbooks dot com