Micki Krimmel with the team. Photo by Pulp Secret’s Charles Schneider.

The one and only Micki Krimmel was recently visiting New York for the first time in years, and we asked her to come and do a workshop with our team about building better community features for our audiences.

Besides being the only person I know of who has a photo of herself with Al Gore up on Flickr, Micki has been a web guru to countless people in her work at Participant (where she helped Mr. Gore build the massive grassroots movement at climatecrisis.net), Revver, WorldChanging, and most recently as a social media consultant and entrepreneur.

Out of our two hour brainstorming session about our networks and shows came a number of suggestions that would be great for anyone building an offering around video content on the web:

1. Everybody should be a community manager.

It doesn’t matter if there’s a person in your company with a title of community manager, or director of community. Every person on the team should be involved and responding and keeping the conversation going.*

*Clay Shirky’s book, Here Comes Everybody, is required reading for anyone in our space.

2. Whuffi can be more valuable than money.

Cory Doctorow’s novel Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom describes a future where all material needs are met, so people are incentivized by reputation and social capital - Whuffi. This is something that happens in communities all the time — people can often get things done by virtue of their social reputation or prestige that money can’t. Tara Hunt’s new book is all about it. [Micki added on her blog: “My point here was about incentives. It’s common for people to want to provide material incentives to people for participating in their community. People don’t talk to each other for prizes. They do it for other, more personal reasons. They do it for social capital, for whuffie, or as Clay Shirky says in Here Comes Everybody, Love.”]

3. The most scalable way to respond to people is openly and publicly.

Micki cited tools like Get Satisfaction as a way to respond to customer questions in a public, easy to access way, as well as elements in our networks like Indy Mogul and ThreadBanger that turn responses to viewer questions into content for the whole audience.

4. Consider ending every video with a question.

This is pretty self-explanatory, but a simple way to get audience responses that not enough video creators do. Ze Frank did it brilliantly. We recently ended our breakout Ultra Kawaii hit (2mm+ views), “Animal Idol”, with a question that’s garnered over 30,000 comments and counting across the web (according to TubeMogul, we’re still averaging over 750 comments a day on that episode, despite it being up for two months).

5. The easier you make it to participate, the more people will.

It’s easier to favorite or digg something than rate something, easier to rate something than comment or review — which is consistently why less people do each of those things. You could follow a question (see #4) with a simple thumbs up/thumbs down polling widget. Our new Nite Fite site is going to include a simple tool to poll people during and after every episode, and it’s going to be interesting to see if people use it more than they use comments.

6. People put something on their blogs because it says something about them, not because they want to promote a product they like.

Think about that one for a while.

7. The difference between your YouTube channel and your site is often like the difference between a public and a private space.

We talked about this for a while: for instance, how comments on a YouTube video tend to be about the creators, where comments on your own site tend more to be addressed to the creators. The difference between one place and the other can be like the difference between watching a movie in the movie theater with a bunch of strangers, and watching it at home with a group of your friends.

8. Don’t just reward the top participators.

Having all kinds of participation is valuable. Look for ways to welcome the newest people who post for the first time or join the community.

9. If you don’t have the tool, that doesn’t mean don’t do it.

Engage people with whatever tools you have. A great example from our own world is the Indy Mogul “Request an Effect” page, which addresses rule #3 above with a pretty basic tool: a blog post with a super long comments thread. However, with over 1000 comments page has gotten so hard to use, we’re probably not getting as much participation as we could (see rule #5) — if we replaced this page with a browsable, searchable forum of some kind where people could vote on favorites, it would get even more use.

10. Don’t worry about exclusive content for your site.

Content goes where it wants. What’s exclusive about your site is the community experience you offer — it can be a safe place, where you can get to know people with common interests. Making that the best experience possible is the real key to building unique value in your site.

Thanks, Micki! So I’m curious — anyone reading out there: useful? What would you add to Micki’s advice?

In the long term, it’s probably a bigger deal that Apple’s creating the first mobile platform that people I know outside the mobile business actually seem excited about developing things for, in a way people never got excited about Java or XHTML or WAP or BREW (never heard of any of those? Exactly) with the iPhone 2.0 software update and the new iPhone 3G. Really looking forward to seeing the first wave of socially-networked, GPS-enabled, high-speed iPhone applications and all the great entrepreneurial opportunities they’ll create — Piper Jaffray has estimated there’s a $1 billion business in iPhone apps in 2009.

But in the short term, the biggest deal for me looks like MobileMe. I don’t love the name — if it sounds like something Microsoft would name a product, that’s because it is.

But as a feature I’m really looking forward to it, and I don’t even need to buy a 3G iPhone to benefit from it, I can use it with my good old iPhone Classic. Here’s why: in a normal week, I can’t be bothered to sync my iPhone more than once or twice, but these days, I absolutely live by iCal. I don’t have an assistant — if I schedule a meeting or a call, I put it in iCal and set a reminder. If I have a task to do, I create a to-do and set a date and priority. If I’m out, I pull up my iPhone calendar to see where I need to be next. But that doesn’t work if you don’t sync your phone every day. Add to the complication that I use three different Macs regularly — one at home, and a Mac Pro and a laptop at work — and even with regular .Mac syncing it gets hard to keep everything up to date.

For a while, I was tempted to move completely to Google Calendar, but that’s not ideal when you don’t have an Internet connection. So I’ve created a crazy quilt system using a plugin called BusySync to sync my three different computers’ iCals with a Google Calendar account. It works pretty well: when I’m out, and my iPhone calendar isn’t up to date, I can pull up Google Calendar via a mobile phone or over a web browser, and my coworkers can subscribe to my free/busy information in Google Calendar or iCal without too much trouble. Plus it syncs in real time over the Internet as things change, instead of on a once-a-day schedule via iTunes or .Mac, both of which always seem to take forever to complete a sync.

MobileMe will let me throw the whole system out: any time I update a calendar entry or to-do on any of my computers, or my iPhone, as long as I have a data connection, everything else will be updated seamlessly, if all works as promised. And I imagine it won’t be hard to find some way to keep a Google calendar updated too, for any friends I have who prefer that.

I’m a little bummed the .Mac brand is going away. I’ve been a subscriber for years, still use my mac.com email as my main personal address, and like the name a lot more than MobileMe or the new “me.com” domain. But on the plus side, I’m happy to see that much of the visual design of MobileMe was done by two of my favorite designers in the world, Meg Frost (of Cute Overload fame) and Bobby Andersen. Bobby did a bunch of design work for Next New Networks (including the site for Ultra Kawaii) and Tumblr (including the amazing Dashboard icons) before going to Apple, and I won’t lie: we tried our best to hire him here instead. But it’s a once in a lifetime chance to work directly with Steve Jobs in the Apple designer priesthood on a key project, and it looks like Bobby’s knocked this one out of the park, from the screenshots I’ve seen so far. Congrats, Bobby, and I can’t wait to try it.

My inspiration and friend Steven Heller has written what seems like his 1000th book on graphic design called Becoming a Digital Designer (with David Womack). He conducted a great interview with NNN founder Tim Shey. (Which was particularly inspirational to Tim, who’s been a Steve fan himself for years).

…..

Case Study: Small-screen Television

Timothy Shey, founder and head of network development at Next New Networks

Q: How did you get drawn into the digital world, and into design specifically? Did you train as a designer?

Tim: I grew up doing digital design, though I didn’t know it at the time.

As a kid in the 1980s, I would design and write software games on my Commodore 64, and was also pretty active on the BBSes (bulletin board systems) that were a precursor in many ways to the Web. Design then meant working in low-res pixel and ASCII art, but it was good training for what I’d end up doing in the nineties and beyond.

Design for me has always been about doing the best (more…)

From an email sent by Von Glitschka:
It seems like nearly everyone I know who is a designer has purchased an iPhone this past week. I am no exception and have been anxiously waiting for mine to show up (I ordered it online).

In preparation I have taken some of my favorite pieces of art over the last year or so and have created a set of wallpaper images that are specifically formatted for the new iPhone.

(more…)

Today we launched an upgrade to our networks’ websites that for the first time puts them all on a shared platform with standard functionality, and gives us the ability to more easily stage and launch new features over the coming months. With the exception of JETSET, which is experimenting in its own ways (dig the MIX!), you can see the new platform in action on all of our sites, including the newly launched Indy Mogul, Veracifier, Channel Frederator, VOD Cars, ThreadBanger, Pulp Secret and Fast Lane Daily.

While you may not notice major new changes, there are a number of improvements we’re pretty excited about, including:

• a new layout to make sharing and commenting more accessible
• more emphasis on our network blogs
• support for anonymous comments + one-click commenting for logged-in viewers
• a snazzy new subscribe panel, designed by wunderkind Bobby Andersen (more on him later)
• a new flash player, with better fullscreen support and improved video quality.

Coolest thing about it for me, though? We have our own web-based admin tool, not unlike WordPress, for managing and editing all content and metadata across the networks, including video assets, blog posts, and “about” content on the sites. With a shared platform, all we have to do to customize the look and feel of each individual network site is upload a new CSS file and any images needed in the design of the page. That’s it. So almost anyone in our company can launch a new network in hours — it’s nearly as easy as launching a blog. And we can also grant our producing partners access to the networks they work on, enabling them to blog for the network, moderate comments, or publish new episodes.

We built this ourselves, since nothing out there did what we wanted — which makes me wonder, would anyone else out there like a tool like this to power your own network? That could be an interesting business for us — send me an email (tim at next new networks) if you’d like to test it out should we decide to open that up.

We hope you like the new sites — please let us know what you think, and how we can improve the experience even more. What would you like to see?

Up next, we’re planning to integrate features like browsing by tags, member profiles for viewers and contributors, an even cooler flash player, and easy ways to partner with your favorite network and get recognized for help spreading the word. Big props to everyone on our team who made this happen, especially Marc, our head of technology; Erin Flood, who kept us all in line; and the brillant team at Davidville.

For me, one of the fascinating joys of travel is seeing what’s interesting to different peoples about culture. Generally, and stupidly, I don’t think of Western Europen media at a great divide from the US, but then I pick up the International Herald Tribune and there’s an article celebrating the 50th anniversary of a typeface for goodness sake (The IHT is owned, of course, by the New York Times, where I could rarely imagine such frivolous writing). Helvetica is at once the most famous font of the modern age, and one of the most dismissed, ignored, and revilled. It’s so common that though I think of myself as a middlebrow type hobbiest, I had no idea it was introduced as late as the 50s, which would mean when I first worked with it professionally it was less than 20 years old.

Read the article, see the movie, use the type. We do.

(Thanks to Richard Rutter for the great photograph of the great Helvetica documentary poster.)