Poor Richard’s Building Online Communities

Poor Richard’s Building Online Communities shows how anyone with Internet access can create an online community. For businesses, Web communities provide tightly targeted audiences for higher ad rates, more efficient merchandising, excellent word-of-mouth publicity, and customer loyalty. Online communities can also be used to promote a special interest group or help an organization communicate with its members. Such communities are perfect for Scout groups, professional associations, sports clubs, schools, fraternities and sororities, families spread across the globe, and any other group of two or more people that wants to share information. In many cases such these communities can be set up at no cost beyond the time involved. [ This is the unabridged version in PDF format of the actual Top Floor Publishing book of the same name. Download ]

Chapter 1: What Is Online Community?
Chapter 2: Online Community Options
Chapter 3: Participating Effectively
Chapter 4: Finding, Joining, and Participating in Mailing Lists
Chapter 5: Creating and Managing Your Own Mailing List
Chapter 6: Finding, Joining, and Participating in Newsgroups
Chapter 7: Creating and Managing Your Own Newsgroup
Chapter 8: Finding, Joining, and Participating in IRC
Chapter 9: Creating and Managing IRC Channels
Chapter 10: Finding, Joining, and Participating in Web-based Communities
Chapter 11: Creating and Managing Your Own Web-based Community
Chapter 12: Publicizing Your Community
Chapter 13: Encouraging Sharing and Responding to Dissension
Chapter 14: Making Money with Your Community
Chapter 15: Privacy, Spam, and Other Issues
Chapter 16: Managing Groups of Communities
Chapter 17: The Computer Book Publishing List
Chapter 18: Knitting.About.com
Chapter 19: Comp.compilers
Chapter 20: soc.religion.unitarian-univ
Chapter 21: The uua.org Mailing Lists
Chapter 22: The Origins of the UUA Mailing Lists
Appendix: Resources for Online Community Managers