This is part one in a series about ways you can deal with the trials and tribulations of a growing user community. Part two will be posted in the next few days and will deal with iterating on your site’s features and usability in order to accomodate the needs of your user base. Interested? Subscribe to my feed to keep informed of new additions to the series.

As many of you are aware, the reason I’ve been quiet over here of late is because I’ve been busy maintaining Protagonize and blogging regularly (in video and otherwise) on the official Protagonize blog.

What you may not be aware of is that the site is growing quite steadily, and with little fanfare, is starting to run in to the inevitable growing pains that social networks and communities tend to experience in their formative months (and years.)

I thought it would be useful to explore and discuss some of these issues, without getting into serious technical detail. If you can manage to avoid these problems, you’re well ahead of the pack.

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1. I thought making a short video blog entry wouldn’t take long. Then I spent two hours figuring out the best spot to shoot it and then doing trial runs to see how it looked.
2. Wow, do I need a new webcam. My old Logitech QuickCam just doesn’t cut it.
3. You need some serious balls to talk in front of a camera for ten minutes.
4. I need some decent video editing tools to make things look more professional. (And better lighting.) Badly. Anyone have any suggestions? (Windows)
5. If you make a mistake with no editing tools, you’re kinda screwed. Especially 8 or 9 minutes into a ten-minute segment.
6. It’s a lot easier to make a fool of yourself if you’re alone in a dark room and not on a stage somewhere.
7. I look and sound way better in person. (I hope.)
8. Ten minutes goes by scarily fast, even when you don’t have much to say.
9. Once recording the video is complete, you still have a good hour or more of uploading, encoding, tagging, describing, etc. Viddler is pretty slick, though.
10. Watching yourself on video is rough. I thought I was a helluva lot wittier when I was recording it.

Curious as to what I’m talking about? Check out this week’s roundup blog post at Protagonize.

[This blog entry has been re-posted from the Protagonize blog. You can view the original entry here.]

I came across an interesting blog post on ReadWriteWeb this morning that got me to thinking a little about how Protagonize works versus many of the diverse other collaborative writing systems available on the web right now. The author of the post referred to Protagonize as “very slick”, which is all well and good, but the user comments were actually what caught my attention.

In the general sense, there are many similarities between the larger sites out there; many provide author profiles, many allow authors to collaborate on the same stories. What I have noticed is that the prevalent theme amongst many of them appears to be that the end goal is to produce a novel, novella, or something “publishable.”

One of the comments lambasting collaborative writing over on the RWW post was of particular interest:

“Penguin publishing house tried this already and it was an EPIC FAIL! It was called a Million Penguins … it was a wiki novel…and…it was awful. Never published, and they abandoned the project - but best of luck!”

As a brief disclaimer, I didn’t become aware of A Million Penguins until well after the project was over, probably about six weeks ago. It definitely has some parallels with Protagonize, but the goal of the project is entirely different. I think what the commenter above unintentionally hit on is the grey area between many of the collaborative writing projects out there right now.

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After pontificating on the newly available Twitter AIR clients available last week and how they were impacting my usage of of said microblogging service (versus Facebook’s status updates), I figured I’d write a bit of an addendum now that I’ve had a couple of weeks to use it on a more regular basis.

Twitter has been blogged about, covered by the media, and discussed to death countless times, I’m sure, but I’m thinking about it from a slightly different perspective. I’m trying to analyze how why it’s so successful and where that success lies in terms of application development; i.e. what can I learn from Twitter’s (and other microblogging platforms’) success, and what can I apply to my own products.

Something that struck my in the shower yesterday morning was how much Twitter reminded me of a certain period of my life. Back in the early-to-mid ’90s, I — along with many other socially-challenged folk I knew at the time — spent a lot of time sitting around, chatting online, sometimes mindlessly, sometimes with a bone to pick, but generally just because we had nothing else to do. Where did I spend much of this time? In the underground (uhm, yeah, well, that might be slightly overrated now) art scene on IRC (Internet Relay Chat, for those of you not familiar with it.)

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I was asked recently to put together a list of site marketing and SEO-related tips and tricks based on the last few months (and years, with other projects) of experience I’ve had trying to help build traffic on Protagonize.

(Beware, this is pretty long, but I hope it’ll be of use to you.)

Curiously, until I launched Protagonize, I really hadn’t given much explicit thought to optimizing my site for search engines. I just kind of assumed that if people wanted to find me, they would, and if not, I didn’t really care. Of course, with a personal blog, it’s easy to blow off doing any kind of serious SEO work. I had no real incentive to get myself ranked higher, so why bother?

Along came Protagonize, shortly before New Year’s eve last year. After spending several months working on the site, I immediately launched into trying to get the site to rank higher in various search engines. Apparently, this is a slightly more difficult task than I had imagined. I’m by no means an expert (obviously not, since my blog’s PageRank currently ranks higher than Protagonize’s, for whatever reason), but since I did manage to generate a decent amount of daily traffic out of absolutely nothing, I figured I’d publish my unscientific findings so far and post updates as I experiment.

I’ll try and keep these concise, from the more general to the more specific. Feel free to suggest other techniques or alternatives, and I’ll add them to the list. I also keep track of various SEO links on del.icio.us, so feel free to subscribe to my SEO bookmarks feed there as well.

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