The Point of the Loop
On Friday, we quietly launched indieLOOP (see my profile), our new social networking space at indieWIRE. Gone are the days of just providing classified and event announcements and a scattering of discussion boards: we've always wanted to provide the community something far more substantial than just that. So for the next few weeks, I'm going to be blogging about indieLOOP and some of the cool things we hope the indie film community do with the tools inside it (and, hopefully, I can point out some good examples to give other people ideas.) The place to start, though, is with what the point of the LOOP is (as it helps to visualize some of the things we imagine people might do with it.) Here's the key: as a community gets bigger and more public, participating in that community can become overhwhelming (especially online.) Typically, online community is an all or nothing affair -- small private conversations, or large public ones.The natural way to overcome that is to filter your view of the community through the people you are already connected with -- what events are they attending and hosting? what are they journaling about? what bookmarks have they shared? what groups are they participating in? Maybe, in fact, those reciprical friends are the only people you want to share your journal with. Maybe you have a photo album you only want 3 other friends to be able to see. indieLOOP tries to cover all those bases. You can have materials (from events to photos) available only privately, you can have other materials (from journals to albums of photos) shared publicly, or somewhere in between. Just as an example, every indieLOOP member has a "Journal" which is essentially like having a small blog if you're posting publicly (you can read the public journal stream here). An indieLOOP Journal is very different from a blog, though, since each entry can be limited to totally different viewers -- this entry is public, that entry is just for my reciprical friends, this other one is private between me and one other person. We think that some of the "best stuff" the community will do won't ever be publicly seen (although we're hoping some amazing things happen publicly as well.) With indieLOOP, indieWIRE can be a place more private discussions to take place in addition to the public ones: it is a community crafted by the community. Lots more to blog about with indieLOOP, but in the meantime indieWIRE members (and SF360 members!) can get started setting up a profile and jump right in. In the next few weeks, I hope to highlight some of the interesting things you start making!
|