Now, I'll admit that I'm definitely on the outside looking in of the blogging/web 2.0 community. While I manage very large sites with a ton of users and reach, I'm still on the periphery. Why? Well, I live in Michigan. Not exactly a state known for it's thriving IT industry. If you go beyond IT services that support manufacturing companies, you can probably count on one hand the number of companies doing anything significant with online communities or digital media.
Yes, I'm a bit of a victim of geography here, and even though it's all online now, it's all IM, Twitter, email and blogging, proximity is still important. So when I see events like Gnomedex coming up, I'm interested because it could be one of the few opportunities I have this year to actually network with other people working in my field. And in this nebulous profession, professional networking is king.
We're back again with another set of questions asked by you, and answered by members of the WinCustomize moderation team. Today we hear from WOM, Koasati, Zubaz, Elvee, Erk, Jafo, Starone, Quentin94 and Fuzzy Logic. Remember to check back again next Friday for Part 3! Question 1 - What is the best thing about being a moderator? The worst? (Zubaz) Wizop WOM Being able to contribute to WC. I spend hours a day modding and watching the g...
The other day I happened to pop on over to my WinCustomize profile page to see if there was any action on my guest book, and I glanced past my "Member Since" date. You know what I saw? That I was coming up on my 5 year anniversary as a member of the Stardock community. November 30, 2002. Five years ago I came across a game called Galactic Civilizations. There was a beta test going for anyone who bought the game so I signed up for an account, sent over some cash and was so...
In our ongoing efforts to improve WinCustomize and make participating and contributing more fun and fulfilling for our skinners, we're looking at changing around how certain systems related to user reward work. The first one is the Medals system. Currently automatically award Medals to users for hitting any number of milestones here on WinCustomize. We track who's the top skinner across the entire site, who is the best in any particular gallery, how many downloads are achiev...
To kick off our recently revived "Featured Skinner" series, we've sat down with well-known member of the skinning community, vStyler, to ask him a few quick questions about his thoughts on skinning, how he got started, and a little bit about his skinning studio, MaxStyles, which has recruited community members such as I.R. Brainiac, messiah1, J. Aroche and others. I'd like to thank vStyler for taking the time to answer these questions in such depth and for providing a great preview shot of h...
A little while ago, Brad started talking up the upcoming refresh to WinCustomize. He mostly talked about features and some cool stuff you could expect from the new site, but so far, all you've had are lines of text, nothing to really sink your teeth into. Seeing as how we're all about the visual aspects of our computers, I thought it might be nice to give you a little taste of what the site is looking like at the moment. Overall, better usability, and a slicker look and feel. ...
Anyone who's been on JoeUser long enough remembers the days of diamond-d, Orrin Woodward, Island Reef Casino etc. These were blogs that pushed either a company, a product or a service. Often times they would submit a flood of posts to crowd out the Recent Articles list. And it turns out that some of those blogs were part of a Google bombing effort to raise one company's Google ranking. These were articles that didn't invite discussion, and were usually bad copy-paste jobs...
Every day, thousands of people come by this website, and many of them participate on the forums, leave comments on skins, icons, themes etc. One of the things that makes WinCustomize great is the community interaction, the ability to swap opinions and ideas, and even just regular everyday chit-chat. Forums are great for community building, but sometimes you want a more immediate reaction, or you're bored and want someone to entertain you for a little while. For those who want m...
I've been a member of the Stardock Community since November of 2002. I'm nowhere near being one of the early members, and in fact I came to Stardock by a route much different from most. I'm not a windows customization junkie. In fact, at the time my only experiences with WindowBlinds has been under Win98 on a woefully underpowered machine and the themes I was able to find weren't all that great to look at, so I was pretty much turned off by the whole customization deal for quite a while. ...