I have fallen in love with Ning.com! What is Ning? For the uninitiated, it is a very easy to set up and use online social community that allows users to upload all forms of media, share it with their friends, create groups, post blogs, etc.
I’ve blogged about Ning before but I wanted to revisit it and mention a particular project we have been working on here at Small Box. Our music website, MusicalFamilyTree.com, recently relaunched with an integrated Ning community that syncs up with our MP3 archive of Indiana music from the the last 30 years.
We are only a little more than a month into this new incarnation and the community growing rapidly. We recently passed 400 members and many of them are very active. I have promoted several active users to Admin status to delegate some of our responsibilities.
We have seen many other Ning communities pop up recently. In fact you might be a member on some and not even know it! Here are some other cool Ning communities that are Indiana based.
www.smallerindiana.com an online tech centered business networking site.
www.indyadgab.com a cool site started by MediaSauce folks for Ad people to exchange work and ideas.
thecontentwrangler.ning.com a site started by our Scott Abel as a community component of his popular blog The Content Wrangler.
So consider how you can create and foster your community, as small or large as that may be. And maybe you might decide to use Ning to create your own little online community.
Jeb, you forgot to mention
http://dogbook.ning.com
It was started by some guy named John (who looks A LOT like the dog whisperer, BTW).
The novel thing is that he actually appears to be encouraging users to create accounts FOR THEIR DOGS!
He’s got video of dogs typing and some of the posts only make sense if you imagine a dog pounding away at a keyboard.