I first started blogging in 2005 when I started the Badminton Video Magazine. I looked at a number of different platforms, but eventually settled on Wordpress. I experimented briefly with Joomla, but found it far to complex for my limited technical skills. Since then things have evolved significantly in the world of social media. Wordpress has so many different plugins available allowing you to extend the possibilities of the content management system, and getting free themes or custom designed themes is a breeze. This website is built upon the Wordpress CMS, and likely all websites I ever build will be Wordpress based. Except that now there are some more advanced offerings available from the same nerds who brought us Wordpress.
If you want to run your own blog network, then Wordpress MU is the tool for you. Allow users to set up and run their own blog, on your network. This is a great way to empower your community, your fans, your customers.
Ever dream of running hundreds of thousands of blogs with a single install of WordPress?
WordPress MU, or multi-user, is designed to do exactly that. It is most famously used for WordPress.com where it serves tens of millions of hits on millions of blogs each day.
Turn your blog, or blog network, into a social network. Buddy Press is an excellent way to make your site more “sticky” by giving your users more reasons to stick around and interact with other users. Anyone who’s read the tipping point knows that “stickyness” is one of the necessary characteristics for something to go viral.
BuddyPress is a suite of WordPress plugins and themes, each adding a distinct new feature. BuddyPress contains all the features you’d expect from WordPress but aims to let members socially interact.
The most popular forum/bulletin board software that I know of is VBulletin. VBulletin requires you to purchase a license, whereas bbPress is free and open source. It’s hardly revolutionary in it’s functionality, but a good forum software supported by the Wordpress development community is very reassuring.
bbPress is forum software with a twist from the creators of WordPress.
Have you ever been frustrated with forum or bulletin board software that was slow, bloated and always got your server hacked?
bbPress is focused on web standards, ease of use, ease of integration, and speed. We’re keeping things as small and light as possible while still allowing for great add on features through our extensive plugin system.
The beauty of these solutions is that they are easily extendable, and with the Wordpress development community you know that over time their will be a huge number of plugins to make that easier. Plus you can expect support for years to come as Wordpress is not going anywhere anytime soon.
Previously you would have had to build your websites, and online communities from scratch, but now with all of the open source tools you can get up and going for nothing. Customizing Wordpress, and these Wordpress based solutions is a breeze compared to developing from scratch, even really big players are using these tools now. Guy Kawasaki famously built his website Truemors on a customized Wordpress installation, imagine the possibilities with these new tools.
In order to build a real business online you need to find more ways to build you user base, subscribers, viewers, whatever you want to call them you need as many of them as possible. To do this you need to give them a reason to stick around, you need to provide them with value, and you need to give them a way to connect with you. These tools are all excellent ways of doing this. The media industry and technology industries have converged a lot in the last few years, and with a culture of innovation the technology industry are more prepared to adapt than the media industry.