Alpha Test pt II - September 25, 2008

First I want to thank everyone who commented or emailed me about the Alpha Test post. I'm still processing it all and I have a feeling that I will be for the next few months. You guys confirmed a lot of my assumptions about what needs to happen going forward and you pointed out some stuff I would have missed as well. So I hope that the conversation started there continues, I have a feeling I'm going to be asking you all for lots more over the next year.

We're growing up as a company. In the past Tucker oversaw everything, determined strategy, direction and was the engine by which everything here turned. But now we've grown to the point where it just isn't feasible for one person to run every aspect of Rudius Media. In the past couple of weeks we've gone through a major reorganization. Tucker has shifted over to work exclusively on the movie and on his next book. So Jeff and I are now running the internet and publishing side of Rudius. For those of you playing along at home, yes, I just failed my way to the top.

Over the past few years that I've been a part of Rudius we've done some things very well and some things very poorly. Where I think we've been the weakest is in building a sense of community around our sites. There's the message board, strange universe that it is, but that's always been driven by Tucker and by TuckerMax.com. It's time for Rudius to grow its own community that TuckerMax.com and the message board are part of, not the other way around.

The techie in me wanted to go big. I wanted to redesign Rudius Media from the ground up. User accounts, aggregation, fancy web2.0 stuff. Spend all month playing with the technology and making it slick and shiny and useless. No one but designers get exited about how cool the blog templates are, and that would be fine if we were running a design company but we're not. We're running a content company and I had to stop myself and say "it's about the content, stupid."

That's why I haven't done anything to the front page of Rudius Media yet but start treating it like a blog. If content is what people get excited over, then that's the first and most important thing to get right. Dynamically building pages is awesome, if there's something worth dynamically building.

And that's why this is all pre-alpha. I want to build this from the ground up and I want to make sure it's uniquely Rudius. There are a lot of models out there; Slashdot, digg, kottke, etc. Most people would look at one of them, copy their model and call it a day. It certainly would be easier and quicker to do it that way. But we're never going to be a better fark than fark. We have to figure out who we are and do that well.

I want to give a chance for everyone who is interested to get involved in this community. I'm sure that mostly that will mean people calling me an asshole when I get things wrong. Or calling me an asshole if this ever hits a certain level of success or calling me an asshole if we don't hit certain levels of success quickly enough. That's all part of the game and it's a whole lot better than the old way of doing things. Design a service in secret, call everyone together, wait breathlessly for the big moment, and hope and pray that when the curtain goes up there is wild applause instead of crickets.

And for everyone else who just reads this thing because sometimes I like to get drunk and break stuff, I'm sure there will be some of that as well.

Posted by Ben Corman at 7:47 PM

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Comments

Glad you found the comments useful, cause there really was a lot of good ideas thrown around. I doubt I'm only speaking for myself here, but let us know how we can help!

Posted by: Drasko at September 25, 2008 08:31 PM

You have exactly the right mindset to start building what you're looking for.

I saw two charts one time (possibly Seth Godin, not sure) of how communication affects project success. The failures had small, irregular bursts of communication (like static futzing in silence) and extended on almost forever. The successful ones had lots of communication in the beginning, which slowly dropped to almost nothing. Their lines were short.

Most people reading that piece completely missed the point: Talk a lot to a lot of people in the beginning, figure out what works and fucking run to the finish line as far and fast as you can. You'll get there a lot sooner than you think, if you're doing it right.

I still like NGM.com the best out of the websites I use. Also have about five three-foot high stacks of their magazines in my closet.

Posted by: Tree Frog at September 25, 2008 08:54 PM

Does this mean your own writing gets put on hold? I don't care if you get drunk and break stuff, I want you to serialize novels about it, god damn. I'm leaving.

Posted by: Marcus at September 25, 2008 10:27 PM

I wish you the best of luck in your endeavor.

I'm not sure the web term for this, but my only suggestion is to have a locked bar across the top or the side with everyone's respective blog names. This way you don't have to open up window after window, or go back to the original Rudius page in order to load a particular writer's site. It would just load to the side or below it while the bar would stay locked.

I hope I wrote that in a way that made sense.

Posted by: Matt at September 26, 2008 10:07 AM

Good luck, Ben.
I wish I could give you suggestions on revamping [so to speak] the Rudius Media website, but I forgot all of my web design stuff when my host bailed.

Anyway, next time you break stuff, make it more random than a whiskey bottle.

Posted by: Mel at September 26, 2008 05:33 PM