Gather

[cos]

I'm trying out a new sort of online writing community site, gather.com. What with the recent debates over on beah's LJ about what is and is not a "blog", I feel like noting that Gather is not a blog site (mostly), because its focus isn't the standard blog view of someone's posts in reverse chronological order.

What it seems to be is a place where you publish things (posts? articles? entries?) that other people can find in a variety of ways, comment on, and vote on. The main ways of finding posts seem to be through tags, the automated lists of most recommended and most viewed posts, and Gather's "editor's picks". There are at least a few other community features, including "connecting" (similar to friending on social networking sites such as Friendster and Tribe), and "Gather Points" which through commenting, having people vote for your posts, inviting people to Gather, and so on.

Points seem to be redeemable for... stuff of some sort. Probably not money, but maybe. Which ties in with some of what yaoobruni just wrote on his more respectable blog, about Web 2.0 and the web serf. Especially the parts about money mattering, users being excited even by small rewards, and the "company store" :-)

So, you can find my stuff at cos.gather.com - yes, I admit, one of the reasons I signed up was to grab "cos" while I still could.

Do any of you use Gather?

Comments

[pyrogenic.livejournal.com]

So basically this is everything2.com pre-fact-nazis and with a bankroll large enough to afford more than one webserver?

Not that that's a bad thing at all. E2 missed this boat in such a huge way, and it's long disappointed me.

(snagged pyrogenic & pico @.gather.com)

[cos]

I remember visiting everything2 and reading stuff there occasionally, but I never got the hang of it or any real sense of how it was supposed to work. I didn't even think of it when I saw Gather.

[pyrogenic.livejournal.com]

E2 has tags (sort of -- softlinks -- but not quite explicit tags), reccomendation (reputation/voting plus high-level user C! (chings/cools)), editors picks (editor cools), and "gather points" (XP). Plus it was wiki-like so cross-linking was a breeze. Pipelinking (linking a word to something different) was an art form. I loved E2 for a while there.

[lil-brown-bat.livejournal.com]

So what exactly makes it an "online writing community site", rather than an ordinary ol' web forum? Is it inhabited by "culture critics" or some other form of bacterium?

[cos]

What's an "ordinary ol' web forum"? Whatever it is is probably some sort of online community writing site. But calling it a "forum" sounds like it's mainly a place where people post messages for discussion and then have discussion threads about those posts (such as Usenet, blogs with comments, or old-school BBS message areas).