Anderson is the editor in chief of Wired and the author of The Long Tail. It’s certainly worth your time to watch this video, but at $15 for 55 minutes (some of which is a Q&A), is it worth your money?

Anderson is a very good speaker who has thoughtful and provocative things to say. If your a media executive or editor and you need all the help you can get trying to figure out how to build an online community, it’s probably worth your money, especially if this video is for work. The content is there, and this $15 could help make your online projects a lot more successful.

An individual blogger would probably benefit from this video too, especially if that person is trying to build a strong community. If you’re a journalist or media employee who wants to learn more about using social networking for business purposes, this is probably a bit expensive for your needs. And if you’re a journalism student, it’s probably way out of your budget.

But you can read my full review below and decide for yourself if Anderson’s talk is worth the money. It’s certainly a very good talk. Anderson lays out a blueprint for what media companies can do to roll out successful social networks. The key for Anderson is to first have compelling, niche content.

“Social networking is a feature, not a destination,” he said. “It’s something every good site should have. It’s not something you go to.”

Without that compelling content people won’t come to your site. Social networking should be about building community, Anderson said. It doesn’t have to be about friending people, according to Anderson, but rather it can be as simple as tracking the comments and posts made by users of a community and allowing others to see their history — like Slashdot.

Blogs can be a simple way of forming a community. We have seen that at Beat Blogging with many of our beat bloggers, and Anderson has noticed the same trend to. With a few added features beyond a basic blog, a blog can become a social network.

Even with the right tools, however, it’s still about specialization. Anderson recommends figuring out a specificity for your site and then making it more specific. Maybe you want to make a blog about digital photography. Anderson suggests narrowing that down a bit.

“The world does not need another generic social network,” Anderson said. “The world needs an infinite number of hyper focused social networks that are about individual subjects.”

Anderson is not a fan of Facebook or MySpace, but he is a big fan of Ning, because it’s a social networking service that caters to the niche.

“It’s not about Ning, it’s about individual topics, whereas going to Facebook is always about Facebook,” he said.

Ning has hundreds of thousands of networks ranging from the very small to large, but all are focused around a niche. Wired Journalists is an example of a medium-sized Ning network (one that all of you should be members of). I should caution, however, that most of our beat bloggers who have tried using Ning have not found success.

Part of the problem is that Ning requires people to go to yet another site. If you run a Ning site like Wired Journalists that’s fine, but if you want to add a Ning site for your beat, it can be asking a lot of users to have to go to multiple sites. As a news organization, you could have your content and community in one place on a blog. Ning isn’t the best place for that concept.

But the biggest problem we have seen with Ning may have been a lack of desire from users, and not Ning itself. Some niches were too vague (geographically focused, instead of subject-matter focused) and others weren’t organic. People weren’t interested in the ways the niches were broken down.

Anderson has found niche success with Ning, and his site is probably a good blueprint for how to form a compelling Ning site. He runs a network for amateur unmanned aerial vehicles. Very niche. Yet, it generates about 5,000 page views a day and makes about $400 a month from Google Adsense.

That’s not bad at all for a side hobby. That’s not bad at all for placing only one ad per page.

The last major point I want to stress about Anderson talk is how he considers engaging the community to be important. We have noticed this as well over at Beat Blogging. Anderson is not afraid to admonish users for poor behavior or outright ban them. But he also interacts with users and actively engages the community.

The comments section of any site will be cleaner if the owner (or blogger or writer) takes responsibility for what happens there. Eric Berger says people are less willing to post acidic comments if they know original writer is there reading their comments and judging them.

Anderson goes over more topics then this, but these are the key ones I highlighted from his talk, especially for journalists. The best use of this video might be to get a bunch of people together to watch it and then discuss it once it is over. It’s certainly a conversation starter.

You can watch a preview of the video here.