Compass Designs .net

You may have noticed a couple of days ago, I added some new community/social networking features to compassdesigns.net - powered by Jomsocial. "What's the deal?" you might ask...

Over the last few months I have noticed more and more of my blog posts and presentations talking about community in some fashion. From presentations at the Denver CMS Expo about Building Online Communities, to tutorials about Building Online Communities with Joomla, trying to help build communities around charity organizations websites and musings on "are Online Communities the new Blogs?". I have even watched over the growth of two communities in my own businesses at Joomlashack and Simplweb.

This hasn't been an intentional path, but last week I really noticed it for the first time.

At the same time, a couple of other things have been happening. First is I have seen an increase on the amount of Joomla activity on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter. Second was the release of Azrul's excellent Jomsocial. A "social network" in a box if you like.

So, putting all these things together, had me thinking. I seem to have been telling people that online communities are not a fad, but a strong trend that will be here to stay. Success might well be determined by those that are able to manage their own communities, and those that cannot.

I have a goal here at compassdesigns.net of using the blog as a test bed for things I am talking about. Sometimes "eating my own dog food" goes well. Other times, it doesn't, case in point was my traffic loss when I migrated to Joomla 1.5.

Well, its time to get naked with the pitfalls of trying to build a community...

So, I have installed and set up Jomsocial here. Come on in and join the fun! It will be a living test-tube for us all to see (and stumble I expect) as we see if we can't see what this social networking thing is all about.

I have already seen some great photos of where I was born!