That obsession lead me into a darkroom in college, but I soon lost patience with the art majors. So I took my camera outside and shot for the local papers. That got me into journalism, writing, and editing. When I bought my first mac in 1992, it was so I could design and produce a small Santa Cruz newspaper. I can trace my entire current life back to that pizza box-shaped LC III.

But, if I had to name one guiding principle, it’s would be this. I try to design sites that create a unique experience, without ever letting the design upstage the content. In {fray}, the story is king. Nothing should get in the way of the user’s experience of reading it, feeling it. The design is there to make it unique, and to seduce the reader into reading, but once that’s done, I think the design should take a back seat and let the reader just experience the story.

I had this teacher at Claremont High. Madam Adam. She was this tidal wave of a woman, who really nurtured me. And she took no shit. When I came in empty-handed, she’d say, “Where’s your story?”

“Oh, I couldn’t finish it, I was overwhelmed. I had this horrible day, and…”

“Then write about that,” she’d say, handing me a pen.

Madam Adam taught me that everything was a story, if you looked at it from the right angle.

Then, in college, Conn Hallinan, an Irish spitfire troublemaker if there ever was one, taught me about journalism – research, interviews, that independent muckraker spirit. I went on to run a gonzo newspaper, The Fish Rap Live!, that combined the best of both worlds into personal journalism.

I’ve always wanted to be a writer, but even after all that, I still never had much confidence as one. In many ways, I’m a member of the generation of writers that the web has created. Without the web, I’m not sure I would have ever written what I’ve written, or told the stories I’ve told.

“The web offers an incredible opportunity to connect people, but for it to work you have to offer compelling content, elegant tools, and clear navigation, all wrapped up into a beautiful design that creates a memorable experience.”

Phew!

I am so proud of this book. I just printed the entire thing out from pdfs and read it three times and I still love it. It’s not like any book out there. It’s not a do-it-my-way manifesto, it’s not a dry academic book, it’s not a pretty content-less design book. Mostly it’s a collections of lessons learned the hard way – personal stories about websites that have succeeded (and failed) in creating community online, as told by me from my experience, as well as a collection of some of the most impressive people in the community space: Steven Johnson, Rob Malda, Howard Rheingold… people who have been in the trenches longer than anyone else.

I mean, books are things that are written by Authors, right? And I’m not an Author. I’m just some guy who makes websites that never make any money!

The best advice I could give a first time author is this: Stop thinking about what you’re doing as Writing A Book. Writing a book isn’t anything special. It’s a job, like plumbing is a job. Just get up in the morning, drink some coffee, and go do it.

Then, when it’s done, you can go back to thinking that books are special again.

Seriously, when did email become this bane? I remember liking email once.

The problem is, I guess, that I have so many projects going on at once, personal and professional, and email is the primary conduit for all of it. Sometimes I feel like I’m playing tennis with a hundred people at once. I’m lucky when I can hit back a fraction of the balls.

But outside the digital world, life is very good. When I get overwhelmed I can walk out my door and find anything I need. The coffee shop is around the corner, Golden Gate park is four blocks away, the beach is a 15 minute drive. I love my neighborhood, my city.

Why, community functionality, of course! There’s no better way to build repeat visitors, because as soon as you give your users the power to leave a little bit of themselves on your site, they become very attached to the place.

But let’s clarify our terminology here. “Community functionality” doesn’t mean you have to recreate the Well, with all its endless scrolling pages of threads and comments and posts. Community functionality can be small, tightly-focused feedback loops (like {fray} questions) or projects that invite a highly-specific kind of contribution (like The Mirror Project).

In 1995, I started my first web zine, Tweak, which included a section devoted to personal storytelling called First Person. That was basically a proto-{fray}.

Later, in 1996, I went to Burning Man for the first time and, like most first-timers, had a watershed experience. When I got back, I had this hunger to connect with other people who had gone, to share our stories. So I put up a collection of photos on fray.com, a domain I’d bought a few months earlier and was still thinking about what to do with it.

Lots of people had photo galleries of Burning Man. But I wanted to actually get people to talk about their experiences. So I added a quick and dirty guestbook script to each image, so that visitors could post their stories of what they thought of that moment I captured on film.

And that was the first {fray} story.

We’ve continued on that theme ever since – seeking connection through personal stories.

But “weblog,” to me, simply implies a format: one page with short bits of content arranged reverse-chronologically. I think, by now, the term is content-agnostic.

It’s a format that works very well on the web because of the way bookmarks and browsers work. It’s convenient. I know I can always go to one URL and easily see what the author (or authors) are thinking today. Easy.

But should every site have one? Of course not. I’m the last guy who would ever tell every site that they should do anything. All sites have different goals, different audiences, different content. If you’re looking for someone to make blanket pronouncements for all websites everywhere, you’ve found the wrong guy. I have no use for it.

Okay. You’re in a good position to add community features to Digital Web because you’ve got the first two pieces already firmly in place: content and audience. The number one mistake people make is to just toss community features out into the web without any content, or to add it to a site that already has content, but off in a corner disconnected from everything. And you’ve already got an audience of people who care about that content, so adding a way for them to talk back is a natural evolution of what you’re already doing. Two down.

Next you need to think about the kind of response you want to enable. How much control you want to keep, versus how much power you want to give your users? My work with clients is ninety percent about setting expectations.

No you don’t need to be a programmer, but it helps to know one. I’ve been lucky enough to have some very talented friends who’ve been there to translate my ideas into Perl. Shoutouts go out to Christian Mogensen who coded the {fray} functionality, Greg Knuass who created Kvetch Chat, and Ben Brown with whom I’ve been working closely on the upcoming Design for Community site.

The number one thing to remember about tools is that they’re there to make your life easier, not harder. The perfect community tool should seamlessly integrate with your site’s content and design. The user should not have to think about how to post, only what to post. The tools should surface where they’re needed, and stay in the background when they’re not.

I recommend to clients that they build a static prototype of their community features before they even start looking at a tool to power it. That forces you think about all the problems you need to solve before you get a tool that may have its own solutions that aren’t right for you. Having a prototype makes the whole process easier. If you’re coding your own tool, then you have something to show the programmer that clearly articulates your vision. And if you’re going to buy a tool, you’ve got something to compare to the sites that use the tool you’re considering. Every tool comes with limitations – UBB sites always look like UBB sites – so the trick is to pick one that starts out looking and acting like your site.

Right now I’m really into a few sites that are all about blending virtual community tools with real life adventure. Nervous Industries is all about using the web to connect with people to exchange real things. Send me a mix tape of your favorite music and I’ll send you one of mine, for example. And Geochaching, where you can download the coordinates of a geocache near you into your GPS device and go on a trasure hunt – and then, of course, come back to the site and talk all about it.

I see a future where there’s no such thing as “virtual community” anymore – just personal communities with real and virtual elements. Right now I have a bunch of people who exist in my head as friends. Some I see in the café on the corner every day, some I see in my inbox. They’re not the same, of course. But they’re all friends just the same.