WEB: SCN: Portal or Destination

[patrick]

Rod,

The point and intent of the message has been missed. People tend to
be literal about what they read and see. They miss the point.

Patrick

--- Rod Clark <bb615 at scn.org> wrote:
> Patrick Fisher wrote:
> > If we want to make it a portal, then why are we wasting so
> > much time and energy? Any moron can get a Geocities page and
> > put a ton of local links on it and write a piece here and
> > there.
> > Do we want to be morons? No, we are better than that. We want
> > people to come to SCN for the community. We want SCN to come
> > to SCN for SCN.
> 
> Patrick, 
> 
>    Maybe we're "morons," but before taking that conclusion too
> much further, please have a look at the top 20 sites for the
> keyword "Seattle," in Google. The people at, for example,
> seattle.about.com aren't there. The people who built the Seattle
> section of the huge Netscape Open Directory aren't there. The
> people at Seattle Insider aren't there. The people at
> hometeamcommunity.com aren't there. The people at
> digitalcity.com's Seattle site aren't there. And SCN is. Why?
> 
>    Our audience isn't the typical "portal" audience, though I'd
> guess it's probably one of the best audiences in the region. Not
> necessarily in terms of disposable income or other usual
> audience measures, but because it's composed so much of socially
> responsible people who want to find where and how to connect
> with other people to do something. Or to learn something about
> the Seattle area that they can't find out from the big media
> sites. Or just to find a local directory that doesn't filter out
> nearly as many of the controversial or difficult or underclass
> sites that many other city guides somehow just don't seem to
> include.
> 
>    This isn't what "any moron" is doing with a Geocities page,
> and it isn't what Seattle Insider or Digital City/Seattle or
> other such portals and general purpose sites are doing.
> 
> > If you are like me, you don't care too much about a site that
> > has all the information going one way. That is why I want SCN
> > to be the Yahoo of the Seattle community area.
> 
>    Yahoo has its strong points, but I think for our audience SCN
> is probably better than Yahoo in those fields where we have
> equivalent menu sections. A lot of what you contend are major
> factors in Yahoo's success aren't at all what made it the most
> popular site on the Internet. Instead, much of what you see as
> their keys to overall success are in fact mere recent add-ons
> that Yahoo tacked on after they had already achieved their
> dominant position. What really made Yahoo so useful and popular
> are the well constructed hand-built menus. That's also one of
> the basic things that has made SCN as useful and popular as it
> is. 
> 
>    SCN itself can do more, but it will always be dwarfed by the
> combined knowledge and efforts of all the people behind the
> hundreds of other sites hosted on our servers and listed on our
> menus, who are working on everything from A to Z. I don't even
> want to keep people from stopping briefly at SCN's site and then
> going on to places that are doing things that SCN itself can't
> do. That in itself is a very valuable function of SCN, that I
> think you undervalue greatly. 
> 
>    The social inclusiveness, the quality of editorial selection,
> and the lack of censorship in SCN's directory are rarely matched
> anywhere. This are some of the reasons why you consistently see
> SCN mentioned as one of the handful of best community networks,
> and why Democratic Media named SCN one of the 100 best digital
> democracy sites the other day. There are many core values about
> SCN that shouldn't be "rebuilt" away in a drive to seek a
> different or more Yahoo-like audience.
> 
> Rod Clark
> 


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