The community website that has become a household brand is "myspace.com."  Myspace.com, Flickr.com and hundreds of other websites are popping up all over the place.  This movement is referred to as Web 2.0.

A community website is a website that has a central theme and gets most of its content from its visitors.  On myspace.com for example, 65 million people - rock bands, movie stars and wannabes -  join for free and are able to express themselves however they feel like it.  Flickr started out as a game and then the owners saw a new opportunity.  The company developed over 2.5 million users, people sharing their shoebox of photos online for all to see, and then sold to Yahoo.com.  And Razorpages is a community of authors helping authors succeed (more about this topic in future blog enteries.)

We now have the "great brains" of our society talking about how the collective thinking of a large community can make better decisions than a few experts.  I find this new trend fascinating.  When Innovations and ZDocs got together on our new community blog site Razorpages.com, one of the primary driving forces was to create a platform for the market to decide if they like a book or not.  Instead of some employee of a publishing house deciding a book is any good or not, our goal is to let thousands of readers decide.  Mostly, market feedback will be in the form of readers deciding to buy a book or not.

Our catch phrase at Razorpages is "Authors helping Authors Succeed."  Here\'s one way this works:  Let\'s say an author has over 1,000 visitors to her blog site each month.  Those visitors may choose to browse other, similar sites that are part of the same Razorpages community.  Also, the author may refer her readers to another book on Razorpages that she thinks the readers may be interested in. 

The other part of how this community works is in the form of RSS feeds which will be the topic of my next entry.  I could ramble on and on about community websites, but the best way to know what one is is to visit one.  www.myspace.com , www.youtube.com, www.flickr.com are just a few to get you started.  And of course, if you spend some time exploring Razorpages you will get a good feel for what a community website is.

If you have any questions, feel free to leave us a comment.