ReadWriteWeb is privileged to have an engaged community of decision makers and thought-leaders. The community manager's job is to engage with our community, to provide support and help develop it. Read on for more details...

We are looking for someone who is an active user of social media tools (Facebook, Twitter, Digg and StumbleUpon to name just some of the ones important to our site). We're also looking for someone with experience managing online communities, strong writing skills and an analytical mind set. This may suit someone with an online marketing or PR background. But we're open-minded about that, as we're mostly interested in your current use of social media.

This job is a great opportunity to work at the cutting edge of social media. So if you'd like to be a part of one of the leading technology blogs on the Internet, email richard AT readwriteweb.com with the words "Community Manager" in your subject line. If you know someone who may be a good fit for this position, please send them our way.

These responses are from Google Plus, Twitter, Facebook and our own on-site comments, and we've used Storify to present them in a clear and easy to follow manner. If you have additional responses, please leave them in the comments.

So Robyn has a wealth of experience in this role! She is also a wonderful personal fit for our brand of smart, passionate, forward-thinking tech news coverage. You'll see Robyn involved in the RWW comments, on Twitter, Facebook and many other social communities - including of course Google Plus!

A big thank you to Tikva Morowati for pointing Robyn in our direction! Also thank you Katy Zack for her help in filling this role. There's nothing like the Social Web, ay! :)

Read more about Robyn on her personal blog. She's on Twitter of course - and don't forget there is a Team RWW list on Twitter, where you will find all of our team.

Check out our coverage of recent community manager hiring news over at Jobwire - our new site tracking completed hires in tech.

Forum One hosts events, offers consulting and publishes in-depth reports about the finer points of community management based on extensive survey data gathered from diverse practitioners.

• We will be promoting Forum One's body of reports to our readers interested in detailed, topical, survey-based advice centered on the community of active community management practitioners.


• Forum One will be promoting our Community Management Guide, an overview of the practice of community management based on interviews, content curation and dynamic discovery of the hottest daily conversations on the topic, to their community. (That's a real honor for us.)


• We will be encouraging community managers in our community to fill out the Forum One 2009 survey on community manager job compensation


• And they'll be sharing the results of that survey with us to report on here. (The findings are always quite interesting.)

Forum One publishes detailed reports on topics like Online Communities: Surviving & Thriving in the Downturn and Online Communities: Platform and Services Satisfaction Report. Those reports are based on surveys, and Forum One reaches inside both large enterprise firms and small startups in their research.

We're proud to get the opportunity to work with these experts in the field and we're excited to get to share with our readers some of the hard numbers that we'll help Forum One collect. We hope this is just the first step in a fruitful collaboration to help foster more effective community management online.

We hope you'll give Forum One's reports a look, as you've been so supportive of ours, and if you're a community manager then we hope you'll fill out the compensation survey as well.

Here's how it works. I keep 100% ownership and control of my blog, which is very important to me. But I get to join a community of quality websites, which has opportunities for network advertising. It also gives my blog wider coverage, especially in the design community. Best of all, the network members help each other out - e.g. I could use some design help and in return I'm happy to give writing advice and tips.

The 9rules community is very strong in web design - there are a lot of beautifully designed websites in the network. I'm hoping to learn a lot from the community in that respect, because to be frank my blog design looks plain in comparison. On the other hand, I pride myself on writing top quality and original content on the topic of Web Technology. So I hope that my content inspires others and that I introduce some of the 9rules community to my niche interests (Web 2.0, Social Media). I think there'll be a lot of quid pro quo.

Heather Champ says that today was her first day working at 2BKCO, the stealth mobile social software startup that Fake announced in June that she was working on.

How did they do it when they built community so successfully together before? "Flickr's community team was all about enabling a vibrant community that created value for itself and helped keep their own members in line," says admirer-from-a-distance Evan Hamilton, Community Manager at customer service platform Uservoice. "The fact that Caterina is gathering folks who worked with her at Flickr is a great sign. Whatever Caterina is up to, she's taking the community aspect seriously, as more startups should be. Can't wait to see what it is!"

Me too.

The influential Flickr Community Guidelines that Champ lead the creation of (eg: "Don't be creepy.
You know the guy. Don't be that guy.") remain one of the most important documents that new online communities should read.

"I've never met Heather, but she's an inspirational figure in our space," says Maria Ogneva, Head of Community at enterprise micromessaging service provider Yammer. "She is a great example of living and breathing her passion. As the community manager for Flickr, Heather embodied the notion that the community comes first, and that it wouldn't be the same without each individual member. Her passion for her community and for the art of photography is apparent and infectious."

What will Fake and Champ bring the world next, together? Time will tell, but they will have a lot of eager people waiting to see what it is when they're ready.

According to the HHS, the program is "a public-private collaboration that is encouraging innovators to utilize community health data to develop applications that help raise awareness of community health performance and spark action to improve health." At today's event a number organizations are demonstrating a preview of their work with the data, including Google, Microsoft and GE.

First Results

• Google: The company imported the public data into Google Fusion Tables where it can be explored and visualized.
• Microsoft Bing: "Using community health data, Bing has created new features that allow easier selection of hospitals based on patient quality of care ratings and new ways to assess potential areas to live based on a combination of community health measures and access to goods and services."
• The Network of Care for Healthy Communities: A Web portal combined with community health data provides officials with policy information, local services, best practices and evaluation tools that can spur local action.
• Community Clash: Created by MeYou Health, "Community Clash is an online card game that engages you in a discovery of your community's health and well-being status and how it compares to other communities in a head-to-head clash. Community Clash gets personal, prompting each player to compare his or her own Well-Being Score and encourage social comparison with friends through Facebook integration."

Opportunities

• Data mashups: Sharing information across data sets and regions will create multiple opportunities. Will there be a management system in place to fix or enhance data sets and their underlying models as needed?


• Services engine: There are a mix of CSV, XML, map data, and other sources available in the data set. Will the sets be offered as APIs and how it will be leveraged across different parties?


• Missing gaps: Will the community health data initiative spawn new areas of research funding?


• Public and private: What will be the focus of private companies that offer services based on this initiative? Will it attract VCs and investors outside of the public sphere?

I've added a 'Recent Readers' widget to R/WW (see sidebar) and I encourage you to add yourself to the Read/WriteWeb community - click here for more details. Let me know in the comments to this post what you think of the idea. Over the past couple of months there have been many active and enjoyable discussions on R/WW, so it'd be great to extend that community a little more using MyBlogLog. Let's see how it goes anyway.

For example just this morning I visited Fred Wilson's blog to read his thoughts on whether startups need to be located in Silicon Valley, as suggested in a NY Times piece (which I saw via Techmeme btw). Fred saw that I had visited his site, via MyBlogLog, and so he joined the R/WW community and left this message:

"richard glad to see your icon on my page just now. i really like mybloglog. it tells me when people like you are visiting my blog. you should try putting the reader roll on your page. it's really great and my readers seem to like it a lot fred"

So I'm encouraged by this kind of blog community interaction and hope to see more of it. Kudos to MyBlogLog for building a system which enables social networking via blogs.

Here is the link again to the Read/WriteWeb community. I'm also interested in your thoughts if you don't like the idea of your face/avatar showing up on blogs.

"Community Pages are a new type of Facebook Page dedicated to a topic or experience that is owned collectively by the community connected to it." Unlike a Facebook page devoted to, or run by, a company, a Community Page might be devoted to an area or an activity that cannot be legitimately claimed by a limited group such as a corporation.

Li-i-i-nks! Li-i-i-nks!

The Connected Profiles certainly add to this proliferation of linking.

Fields in your profile, like city, education and employer, as well as your interests, will now be automatically linked to their respective pages.

"Instead of just boring text," said Li, "these connections are actually Pages, so your profile will become immediately more connected to the places, things and experiences that matter to you."

Additionally, each time you login, Facebook will have a suggestion box filled to bursting with links for you.

Frankly, the proliferation of links that result from these features makes it sound like nothing so much as a content farm like Answers.com or Demand Media.

If you're publicity shy, you may need to avoid these Community Pages altogether.

"Keep in mind that Facebook Pages you connect to are public. You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you're connected to."

The solution? Never connect to any page that indicates an interest you don't want the world to know about. If you find yourself connected already, disconnect as quickly as you can. Given the automatism of the profile links, it looks like you will be publicly linked and will have to de-link from each page you don't want, regardless of how clear you've been about your privacy.

But a whole lot of them seem to be lying in wait to sink their teeth into the nearest virtual pantleg... or exposed jugular. The culture of vehement attack and merciless ridicule is still virulent in a lot of places online. (The whole "You Suck At..." meme is only the latest example.)

Anyone building or managing an online community has a responsibility to keep the oil slick of aggression out of the conversational coastal wetlands. That doesn't mean there aren't lively or even heated disagreements, but that users aren't aiming to actually wound each other. And that responsibility isn't just to users; it's to the business or organization behind the community, because that kind of toxic behaviour rubs off on their reputation.

I won't pretend it's easy, especially with the entrenched culture of an established community. But civil behaviour ought to be the expected norm of online community, not the welcome exception.

More Noise to Signal.

"Attention Netscape users Your Netscape mail hasn't gone anywhere, you can find it right here! Also, My.Netscape and your Stock Quotes are still online as well."

There appears to be a genuine feeling of betrayal by the (very large) set of users who have had Netscape.com as their homepage for some time. Indeed I've been getting comments on my own posts and even emails from Netscape users, upset about the change to the Digg style.

All of this shows how passionate people can get about their Web homepage - and they're just as much a 'community' as the Digg.com users are. It's just that they like the old-school Web homepage, not the new Digg style. Also what this tells me is that while a lot of us geeks and 2.0 types are addicted to our own technology (and our own voices, to be honest), it's pretty darn obvious that A LOT of people want to stick with the status quo. Plus I've noticed a number of comments on the above Netscape.com stories which equate Netscape (still!) with a browser.

I'm not sure what to think about this, because I really do think Jason Calacanis and his team want to do well by the Netscape community - and change can be hard to take. Even Valleywag seems to support Calacanis! The number of Netscape users seems to be rising, but even so they're encouraging users who like the old style to go to MyNetscape:

"For those of you who are missing the old Netscape format, have you tried My Netscape? You can customize your page any way you see fit."

Unfortunately there are signs that many of the existing Netscape community hate the new Digg style passionately enough that they will jump ship to other more traditional portals like MSN. So is this backlash a sign that Calacanis and his team have misjudged what 'normal' people (i.e. non-geeks) want in a homepage and they could lose their brand value with that set of users? Or is it a necessary 'bitter pill' for the Netscape community to swallow - i.e. this is the New Web, get used to it?

I'm interested in these questions because obviously it can be generalized to the broader base of web 2.0 services across the Web, which have yet to make much impact on the mainstream.

The new version of the platform includes HTML5 display, a visualization engine GeoCommons says is capable of displaying hundreds of thousands of data points, web based editing, time-release views of mapped data and many other changes outlined in the announcement blog post.

Now in 2011, the Geo 2.0 community has begun to earn a lot more respect, probably in large part due to the proliferation of interest in consumer location data and independent geo hacking. The new version of GeoCommons continues in the tradition of attempting to bring the new and old worlds of mapping together.

Thirteen candidates have been nominated to fill two "Community Director" Board seats. Among the nominees are several familiar names including Chris Messina, Krishna Sankar, and Joseph Smarr. (For more information on each of these candidates and the other 10 nominees, visit the OpenSocial Foundation.)

Only members of the OpenSocial Foundation are permitted to vote. If you're not currently a member of the Foundation, you may apply for membership. In order to participate in the election, however, your application for membership must be received by 11:59 PM PDT, October 29. The polls for the election close at 11:59 PM PDT on November 3.

The OpenSocial Foundation was created earlier this year through a partnership among Google, News Corp., and Yahoo! with the express purpose of "creating the structure necessary to facilitate open technical development, developing governance and review procedures for maintaining an open source project, protecting and enforcing IP, trademark, and copyrights."

The OpenSocial Foundation has a great deal of potential to influence "the Web that is to be." And the two Community Directors, once elected, will likely have a significant impact on the future direction of this still formative organization. It will be interesting to see who the members of the Foundation choose to guide this development.