Suarez-Potts thinks it's bad for everyone including the open source community since pirated software theoretically takes "customers" away from open source projects. For example, a college student may never end up downloading Open Office since he copied Microsoft Office from a friend, but that's not to say it hurts the money-makers like Microsoft at all. A little bit of piracy helps to establish big company's products as "the standard", hurting open source projects even more and making it harder for them to get their foot into a user's door.
Now we'd like to pose a question: Like the college student used in the example above, does pirating software generally prevent you from trying Open Source software or would you have put the cash down anyway even if you couldn't get it for free?
This morning, the good folks over at the openSUSE project announced the official launch of the merged forums. Prior to this, English speaking openSUSE users had a bit of a confusing ride when it came to joining a support community specifically for their distro -- they had the support forums at the Novell openSUSE site, suseforums.net, and suselinuxsupport.de to choose from. The merged forums, located at forums.opensuse.org, are archived and searchable, and the new forum is open for posting (openSUSE members with an account for the wiki or bugzilla will be able to use their existing accounts on the forums, but suseforums and suselinuxsupport users will need to create new accounts).
Those who have never used openSUSE might have difficulty grasping the significance of this. It seems like a little thing, really... But the real strength of Linux (and any distro) is the knowledge and experience of the community, its experiences with different bits of hardware in different configurations. That strength is undermined when the community is divided between three sites -- even if they're three very, very good sites. If a user asks a question on one site, but the person who knows the answer is on one or two of the others (or doesn't have endless hours a day to comb forums), it is a real disadvantage to the person asking, those searching for an answer to the same problem, and ultimately the distribution in general.
The openSUSE project hopes to add more languages to the merged forums in the near future. Okay, it probably won't happen anywhere near in time for the openSUSE 11.0 release (on schedule for June 19th), but we're guessing that most people really won't mind, being much too distracted with a faster install process and a new and improved version of Zypper.
Twing is a new search engine that indexes almost 5,000 online forums, on subjects ranging from the very general (arts and entertainment) to the extremely specific (Scottish Snooker). On top of its search features, it also has a 1990's-Yahoo!-style directory organized by topic, and a collection of trends and toplists called the Community Buzz Directory. Does Twing actually have a finger on the pulse of online trends? We noticed that the video most linked from forums is Rick Astley's infamous "Rickroll," which is good enough for us.
If you follow any forum regularly, Twing could be useful to you. You can narrow your search down to one message board, which might make a good substitute if the built-in search is faulty in your community of choice. Another promising feature is the ability to sign up for an account to keep tabs on the threads you're following.
Even if you're not active on a forum, Twing has some interesting tools for tracking the hottest links and conversations. Most popular links, threads, and forums are all ranked, and RSS feeds are available for each. Twing says that the most popular thread on the Internet right now is called "longest ever thread." While we don't doubt this is accurate, we'll leave it up to you to decide how practical you find it.
If you live in New York, Chicago, or San Fancisco, you have to check out EveryBlock. No really, you have no choice. It's too cool to pass up. While there are plenty of services out there that aim to give you all the latest news, restaurant reviews, and other information about your community, EveryBlock does an awesome job of pulling together information from disparate sources to give you an overview of what's happening in your neighborhood.
Type in your address, zip code, or neighborhood and EveryBlock will let you read business reviews, news articles, lost and found listings, crime reports, and Flickr images from your community. You can even find graffiti reports, building code violations, and restaurant inspection reports. Actually, come to think of it, EveryBlock might almost provide a bit too much information. The last thing we want is to find an excellent review of a local restaurant only to read on the next page that roaches were found in the kitchen. But if you're not the ignorance is bliss sort, you should definitely take EveryBlock for a spin.
If you're the sort of person who defines yourself by the stuff you buy, has eBay got a new social network for you. The auction site has launched eBay Neighborhoods, which are basically little communities organized around specific items or classes of items. For example, the most popular neighborhood right now is Coffee Lovers, but there are about 600 neighborhoods covering everything from Stephen King to Mountain Biking.
Each neighborhood features an interactive display of content related to that community. Scroll your mouse over the pictures of iPods, bikes, or what have you and prices and other information will pop up. There's also a section where users can post comments about items or the community at large.
Previously eBay users who were craving a greater sense of interaction than "A+++ would buy again!" had to resort to eBay's old fashioned message boards. While eBay Neighborhoods serve a similar function, they're a lot prettier to look at. And more importantly, there are more product pictures on every page, which eBay is hoping will convince you to buy more stuff.
Getting ready for interviews can sometimes be tricky. You just never know what to really expect, but want to stay on your toes and be prepared for anything. That's where InterviewUp steps into place.
The InterviewUp online community allows people to share, ask, find and search interview questions and answers. If InterviewUp manages to attract a strong user community, this could be a great tool for anyone out on the job hunt. The website will be dedicated to interview questions and answers and guide users along the path to doing well in an interview to get the job that are qualified for.
Too bad its currently only in a private beta, and accessible by invitation only.
Six Apart's community-focused Vox blogging service has been making a number of incremental improvements over the last month or two with minor updates to their software. New themes and other enhancements are all welcome additions, but two specific new features turned out heads enough for a mention.
First: the new Vox This bookmarklet. While Vox has been arguably way ahead of the competition by offering the best and most polished tools for blogging items from YouTube, Flickr and Amazon, they've never had a tool like Blogger's Blog This button that allows their users to easily blog things from virtually any site on the web. Finally, Vox This bridges this gap by offering a powerful bookmarklet users can click to instantly blog any site they're looking at, complete with the ability to scrape any selected text and even pictures on the page. The announcement post for this new feature also hints at an upcoming 'links library' feature for Vox, which sounds like it might add a simple linkroll functionality to Vox blogs that is powered by this bookmarklet.
The second major new feature to debut for the Vox community is a Digg This button at the bottom of every Vox post. The button acts just like you would expect, but the release notes that include this feature also instruct users not to get too comfortable with the button, for it will apparently soon turn into a full-fledged Share feature that opens the door for many more social bookmarking and news services. As with the hinted links library feature, we'll just have to stay tuned for a new announcement.
As they stand now though, these are exciting new features that bring some powerful web 2.0 community aspects to Vox, opening it up to the rest of the blogosphere even more, and making it easier for Vox bloggers to participate in the global conversations they're interested in.
One fascinating aspect to online social communities is the ability to meet people around the globe who share your interests. In many cases, you're introduced to people you never would have met under other circumstances.
But the truth of the matter is most of us don't even know the people in our own neighborhoods. Of course, you could walk out the front door and ask to borrow a cup of sugar from the house across the street or better yet, bring them some fresh baked cookies. But where's the fun in that?
Fatdoor is a new social community site (with an awful name) that lets you find people, businesses, and organizations in your area in a Web 2.0 way. In other words, you get a map. And user reviews. Not sure if that restaurant on the corner is any good or if there's a cheaper grocery store nearby? Fatdoor lets you rely on the wisdom of the masses, if you believe there is such a thing, and if enough folks from your neighborhood have signed up.
You can write information about yourself, about your friends and neighbors, and about local institutions. In other words, this startup will either be an excellent replacement for the phone book, or it'll become the online equivalent of a stall in the men's room.
While Fatdoor has launched in alpha, not all neighborhoods are covered yet so you might receive a message alerting you that your neighborhood is in invitation only mode when you attempt to sign up.
WordPress is a powerful and very extensible blogging engine that is gaining more CMS (Content Management System) features with each release. As anyone who has downloaded a copy can probably tell, the directory structure is pretty friendly to hacks and plug-ins, but unless you are your own WordPress coding ninja, you might be asking yourself: where exactly can all these themes, plug-ins and hacks be found? Thus the idea for a short roundup of WordPress download sites and communities was born. Following is a starter list of sites for themes, plug-ins, tips and tricks of all kinds, ripe for helping you take your WordPress-powered site as far as you need to go. Since we're sure we haven't found every site for WordPress goodness, feel free to add your favorites in the comments and we'll update this post with the good ones.
Microsoft is tapping the social network phenomenon by starting up one of their own. This financial social network will focus on finance professionals, and be targeted towards career roles. By the sounds of things, this financial site could be based of the current Microsoft Live pages idea where users get their own personal blog area with the addition of forums, and on Microsoft Dynamics Live.
I know what you're saying. Oh no, not another social network started by a big tech company, and that's exactly what our thoughts are. With Reuters having announced their financial network set to berecently, we could see a full on financial social network war. However, companies like Microsoft do have built in following already, so the potential impact this network could have in a short amount of time could be quite high.
Could Microsoft announce new communities for sales, marketing, operations, HR, and IT fields later this year?
For those who have mastered their narrative skills with a camera and don't feel like waiting for YouTube to start sharing revenue, Zooppa (pronounced: zoo-pa) just might be your ticket to fame and fortune. As a new startup that's been stirring some buzz for a little while now, Zooppa melds user generated video with advertising for a unique business model. Businesses supply advertising briefs - what their product is, who they're targeting, any brand-specific design elements, etc. - and users create advertisements for the company, uploading them for Zooppa users to vote on. After voting closes, the winning video scores a cash prize, though we aren't sure exactly how large of a prize that is just yet.
This looks like a fantastic idea for both aspiring marketers and small businesses on little to nonexistent budgets. Who knows: could we see one of next year's Super Bowl ads come out of a Zooppa contest later this year?
What better way to break up a day than to sit back and check out some cartoons for a laugh. Soon we'll have MyToons.com, a video and image sharing site for cartoons that is currently in private beta. Users will be able to upload and share their own artwork, rank other people's work and start a discussion on each piece. Video players can also be embedded in blogs or web sites. For cartoon lovers, its great to see the styles from all across the globe, and now the MyToons community is set to bring all content together through a streaming Flash player. Through MyToons, users can create their own home page portfolio with custom templates to show off their work, and connect with the community. Thats all we know for now, so stay tuned in to see if this is a hit with cartoon lovers.
Vox, a Six Apart blogging community I admittedly am enjoying more and more each day, has just launched a few major new features, the most notable of which is Groups. Vox members can now create public or private groups for sharing anything you can already publish on Vox: posts, pictures, videos, books and more. Group owners can allows others to admin the group, and members can post either directly to the group or by clicking a button on content from their own Vox blog. I went through groups and added myself to a few before penning this post, and I can say that Vox thought this new feature through pretty well during development.
Below each post composition window now is an 'add to group' button, making it easy to publish content simultaneously to your own blog and any relevant groups. A minor gripe, however, is that they don't employ check boxes here; you can only click on one group at a time, though I don't imagine the greater majority will be adding too much content to more than one group at a time.
Also above all posts and other content on your blog (when you're signed in, of course) is a new 'add to group' button, keeping Organize panel (the admin area) visits to a minimum.
The other big feature in this new release is the much-requested ability to create custom banners for your Vox. A post on their new design.vox.com blog specifically designed to help users build the beest banner(s) they can has all the details, but basically: you can create a banner up to 940px x 200px in size, while anything smaller gets aligned to the bottom right. If this feature gets your creative juices flowing though, definitely check out the new Vox Design blog for all the info you need.
So far I love this new feature, though I must also curse Vox in the same breath for making such a cool community even cooler. Vox has been described as 'MySpace for the literate,' and I tend to agree. Pretty soon I'll be furiously refreshing my home page every chance I get, anticipating every new comment and message from readers and my Neighborhood. Thanks a lot, Vox.
I'm sure a lot of you had holiday parties over the last few weeks. How did your planning go? You could surely have used the new MyPunchbowl service. MyPunchbowl is set to launch its online party planning service on January 15th. Built by Punchbowl Software, it allows users to create an online community for celebrations. Members can use the service before, during and after parties to coordinate events, research ideas from the community, and share party memories after the event.
Unfortunately I was not in on the beta testing for the service, and it is now closed awaiting the January 15th launch. So we will have to stay tuned to check out the how well this service helps us party plan. Similar services in this sector include Evite.com, Eventful, and Upcoming.org.
Do you like news? Enough to have an online RSS aggregator and reader? With a community based approach to news content delivery? A new service called NEooWS is just that. NEooWS is taking a community approach to news and content delivery by building communities that discuss daily stories, allowing for the ability to provide different unique perspectives. It's a great spot to get the latest news updates for what you're interested in. Through the system you can tag, recommend, and save stories to your account. NEooWS has a nice clean interface, however it still seems a little cluttered when you just want the news. I'm going to try this one out further, but I don't think I will let my precious NewsGator go.
Six Apart's community-focused 
WordPress is a powerful and very extensible blogging engine that is gaining more CMS (Content Management System) features with each release. As anyone who has downloaded a copy can probably tell, the directory structure is pretty friendly to hacks and plug-ins, but unless you are your own WordPress coding ninja, you might be asking yourself: where exactly can all these themes, plug-ins and hacks be found? Thus the idea for a short roundup of WordPress download sites and communities was born. Following is a starter list of sites for themes, plug-ins, tips and tricks of all kinds, ripe for helping you take your WordPress-powered site as far as you need to go. Since we're sure we haven't found every site for WordPress goodness, feel free to add your favorites in the comments and we'll update this post with the good ones.
For those who have mastered their narrative skills with a camera and don't feel like 
