Lindblom Media

My good friend Philip Clarke turned me onto ELGG, an open source social networking platform.

This sort of application would be useful for publisher to develop brand loyalty. Collaborative book clubs are the first thing that comes to mind. But there must be hundreds of other uses.

The main point is that these applications would change the way a publisher is perceived. Instead of being seen as a faceless corporation, publishers could use these applications to build communities around its content.

In fact the argument could be made for publishers putting its focus on building the community and then letting the content develop from that community.

I suspect this would not work for large, established publishers because the train has already left the station: everyone knows that they are a business that sells content. Any attempts to push a community model would appear disingenuous. But small publishers with a closely defined niche have an opportunity here.

I'll say it over and over--publishing is a cultural business. The community (ie, culture) comes first, and the publisher serves that community by filtering and disseminating content.

It looks like ELGG is a stand alone application and likely to remain that way (at least as far as integration with Drupal is concerned). The website Zacker.org quotes Ben Werdmuller, the technical lead on Elgg:

"We're big on integration through open standards and would like to encourage that wherever possible; we're not so big on merging and creating bloated, monolithic systems."

OK, then. Still, it will be interesting to learn the capabilities of the other products out there. Here's a pretty good roundup of open source options: Top 40 Free Downloadable Open Source Social Networking Software.

Drupal has a number of social networking capabilities built in. In fact it won the 2007 CMS Award for Best Open Source Social Networking. And new modules continue to be introduced regularly.

Hmmmmm. I wonder if maybe I could develop a collaborative book club site. Why not?