Online Communities | About

About

My name is Martin Reed. I purchased my first computer in 1999, connected to the Internet and was immediately hooked. I began to experiment setting up basic web pages and in 2000 established Just Chat which has gone on to become one of the UK’s most popular online communities with up to 600 simultaneous chat room users, over 340,000 forum posts and over 11,000 email penpal members. In 2008 I was awarded a First Class Bachelor of Sciences with Honours degree in Internet and E-Business.

Community Spark is a community building blog. I share tips and advice on how to build successful online communities whether they are forums, blogs, chat sites or social networks so you can gain a head-start over the competition.

Some people consider online communities to be amongst the easiest to set up and develop as most of the content is user-generated. Whilst this may be true to some extent, developing them up to the point where they reach ‘critical mass’ is extremely difficult.

Of course, the first thing a community needs is people. Once we get the people, we need to encourage interaction and user retention. Once this is achieved, we need to ‘keep the peace’ to ensure the community does not deteriorate into a place of abuse and flame-wars.

In this blog I hope to share much of what I have learnt, and am still learning, when it comes to developing online communities. I hope to detail my successes and failures and will document new developments in online community building as they happen.

So once again, welcome to Community Spark - I hope you will take the time to get involved by commenting on the posts that are of interest to you. This blog is a real community, with regular readers and contributors. I hope you will become one of them, and look forward to welcoming you.