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.

Hope you are having a hot holiday, party people. And since you probably are, and far too busy to get deep with Listening Post, we set up a Twitter feed to keep you abreast of music-related news and tech in bite-sized pieces.

The Listening Post’s Twitter account was launched just three days ago and already it has more than 100 followers. That’s a good start. If they want to see more growth — and drive more traffic –, they’ll have to make their Twitter account into a destination for music fans.

A few suggestions for the Listening Post and all news organizations using Twitter:

• Make sure this Twitter account isn’t just a glorified RSS feed. So far, the majority of the posts fall into this category.
• Make more tweets like this one: "putting together a contest for Weezer fans. Anyone have ideas for that?" It’s great to get users involved, and Twitter is a great social app for two-way communication.
• Making tweets for the latest blog posts are fine, but give people a reason to click. A headline is not enough. Give us the best quotes or info in separate tweets. Make us want to click that link.
• Better yet, get people excited for upcoming posts before they happen. Use Twitter as a way to discuss upcoming stories and news. Maybe the lede is already written, but the details are being fleshed out. Share with us that tidbit of information. In other instances, Twitter can be a great crowd-sourcing tool. Need feedback from users for a story? Twitter is a great place to start.
• And, of course, have conversations with people. That’s where Twitter really excels. It’s a fantastic tool for public conversations. And that two-way communication can build user loyalty.

Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch account is a great example of how to use Twitter to drive traffic. Arrington regularly teases upcoming stories, especially really big ones. He also converses frequently with people about tech topics and in general is a very strong Twitter member. That’s why he has more than 20,000 followers.

20,000 followers is a great way to drive traffic.

One beatbloggingish thing I’ve done recently though is ask the sf_indie email list what is so wrong with Pitchfork’s reviews.  It didn’t come from my beatblogging network, but it utilized some of the same principles.

I ended up with a great quote

Related from Daniel Victor:

From my network I’ve made contact with people who have contacted me outside of the network to give me information.

ie: The network Daniel set up introduced him to new sources – the subsequent sourcing happened in a traditional one-to-one manner, but Daniel never would have met the new sources if it hadn’t been for his network.

I can see in the long term how having all your sources in one spot to contact could ease a reporters life, just as the Roladex must have in its time. Right now, however, online management doesn’t come naturally to beat reporting – or beat blogging.

I checked in with Wired’s beat blogger Eliot Van Buskirk to see how things are going. Below is part of that thread.

From Eliot

I’m behind the eight ball as usual today (why will this digital music news not stop happening for five seconds?), but wanted to get back to you before too long.

I’m liking it, but it’s still not a natural part of my workflow.  I think I might also need to invite some more people to increase the chance of discussions.  Is there a way to alert all members whenever there’s a new discussion?  I could do that manually, but it adds another step to the process.

I like it so far — setting things up was easy, and I love how simple it is to rearrange the home page (put the discussions at the top, rather than the stale welcome message).  Do you think it would be appropriate to use the broadcast message tool whenever there’s a new discussion?

Nothing fits into my work schedule.  I have thousands of dollars worth of project deadlines stacked up, a disaster area of a home office, and six blog posts per day to research and write before I can start on
anything else, not to mention the over 20,000 (literally) unread emails sitting in my inbox.  That said, I am getting some good feedback from the Ning group and I can see getting to the point where it’s a natural part of the day, becoming something that saves me time.

He informed me that the Gazette has blogs, including one from a reporter in Iraq. But the paper hasn’t employed beat blogging – the act of creating a network around a beat, letting sources chat asynchronously.

Brian has the health beat and contacted me to find out how the other Beat Bloggers are going about starting their networks and what exactly we mean by "beat blogging." He hopes to do the same in Colorado. We spent a lot of time talking about the difference between Google Groups, Ning and Facebook – and what the right platform might be for him – covering health in Colorado.

We had a nice conversation, which included practical questions: How much time does this require, what is the measurement of success, will this work locally, do I NEED a blog, and more. Eventually we moved towards the grander scheme of things – anyone can do this!

Beat blogging is not scientifically tested and we don’t own the concept. There is no way to know if your beat is right to build a social network around it. There is only one way to find out – TRY IT.

Anyone can do it: And it is far cheaper and easier to just jump in head first than it is to have countless meetings and debates about whether or not to try it.

Anyone can do this. If enough people do – we can learn together.

I’m following the 13 organizations listed to the right here closely – but I’m keeping my eye on as many reporters as possible. If you think you are or want to be a "beat blogger" – let me know.

I will keep in touch with Brian – as he is (whether he likes it or not) an affiliate beat blogger now.

The other two I have kept in touch with are:
Alexis Madrigal
(who I am due to contact again to discuss his progress)
and
Matt King
I recently had another email exchange with Matt who continues his personal blog and  a Ning site. The next post will be a quick recap of that conversation.

I had a brief chat with Lewis about the beat blogging project and it seems the inspiration for joining this project is the news organizations goal to find more ways to be radically transparent.

Below is an edited version of the conversation with Lewis.

So what is your role in relationship to the blog?

Eliot has free reign, he manages his own blog and does the reporting on
the beat that he covers. I talk to him fairly frequently on the phone
and a lot in emails, but that’s it with him being in NY. The way that
blogs work here in general, people run them and post to them. I may ask
them to expand or cover a specific thing, but in general Eliot picks
what he write s about in a day to day basis.

What is the reality in terms of technical support?
It depends on the specifics of the request. We will put resources
behind what is important to us and we try to give people what they need
to get the job done, but things do take resources and they don’t
necessarily turn on a dime.

But we are obviously not afraid of new technology. If Eliot wants to
put a Twitter feed, nobody would complain or make him jump through
hoops explaining why. He can do whatever he wants.

So what’s next in terms of beat blogging?

Well, we are definitely encouraged to try things and we want to. It’s a
matter of us figuring out exactly what strategy we want to use. It
might be just building his own special little private social network.
If we could do it on his blog, that makes the most sense.

We really want to push being very transparent. When Alexis Madrigal started his experiment Evan Hansen (the editor in chief) sent out an email lauding that move. So the organization is behind it straight from the top.

Alexis Madrigal, joined by Brandon Keim, are "popping the hood on Wired science" – or more appropriately, retrofitting the way they report science for web 2.0.

The cliffsnote version: The two built a Wired Science page on Facebook, began sharing what they read via Google Reader (Alexis) or Del.icio.us (Brandon) and Twitter what they are reporting about. The hope is that they will "create a more interactive experience for readers, so they aren’t just reading what we are writing but feel that they are shaping the news," said Alexis

One month into it I wanted to catch up with Alexis to see how things are going and add it to our ongoing "Lessons from Reporters" list. If you are thinking about getting into this – read this interview! Alexis has good advice and ideas for you to pick from (some of which I highlighted in red for easy browsing).

David: So tell me again exactly how you are retrofitting what you do.

Alexis: We set up a Twitter feed that people could subscribe to know what we know and find out what we are reporting on. This way if a reader knows anything they can chip in. We built a Facebook page and started sharing documents and also started sharing articles that I found interesting from my RSS reader. [Editor's Note: Alexis should check out ReportingOn.com].

Since I did that, several other people at wired have put similar information online.

One thing that is important to know: We have great support from our editor Kristin P. and Evan Hansen,
It has been difficult because we have to find the time to do this and that is the hardest part, to continue developing the ideas, building the infrastructure and finding the right tools.

Tell me about the day-to-day of beat blogging. You mentioned that it takes a lot of time?

I think that with Twitter, and I am not an expert, my impression is
– the more the better. Upon Self reflection I could do a better job
reporting on Twitter. One of the things that is hardest about that
particular platform, you don’t see a return immediately because of the
way the stream works. If you Twitter a question, don’t expect 10
responses right away  — as opposed to a blog post or if you post a
comment.

I think the issue with Twitter is; at what point do you become a
person who is known as ‘always Tweeting about a subject,’ so you become
a place people go to shape science news? I haven’t hit that threshold
yet – but I can see that threshold. At the least, providing that kind
of transparency is good.
[Editors Note: Laster Alexis and I talked
about Twitter clients. He was just using the web interface - which can
be difficult to update often. I suggested integrating Twitter with his
gchat client, so it's as easy as checking your email.]

What about the other tools you are using?

Ideally we’d like to having something on the Facebook page once a
week that will drive people to the  page and have people engage with
each other. The Facebook group is great because
it exposes the network of readers that are reading Wired science. The
most successful networks expose networks that already exist — that’s
what facebook does — because of its lack of anonymity — thats
something we want to do more of.

Can you give me an example of something you’ve done?

One of the things that we’ve done, part of the disruption was the
holiday period (an aside), was a top ten list of new organisms of 2007.
When I finished the list and before it went live I posted the list to
the Facebook page. One thing that could drive people there; unique content, content that is pre-press, which is a classic fan club style move. Along those lines, I have shot some video of Wired’s office, in a kind of ‘bring your reader to work day.’

I’ve noticed since we started doing this stuff we’ve gotten less
snarky comments (we still get some), but we get less angry "how could
you report on this?" type comments, because the readers see who we are.

What has been surprising since starting this?

I thought we would get more uptake in the
beginning. I’m surprised at how much work it takes to keep people
engaged and how easily people will fall out of it. That has been
surprising to me. Essentially what we are offering is access into a
publication with millions of views a month and you can bring stories to
us at any time. Yet most readers are like "oh," and don’t go from
there. I was expecting more people to be more interested in the new
shaping process.

So what’s next for you? Do you have new features you want to add?

The new features are going to be directly and obviously interactive.

We are thinking of doing some debates: reader versus reader, or reader versus expert. Then perhaps create Reddit widgets so people can vote on who won the debate.

And for a period of time — people will debate these things and the best edited version will hit the blog.

And I haven’t run it past my editors: but the people who win the
debates from the readership might become admins on the science Facebook
page.

Because of who we are, we can try to get high profile people to get
involved. Maybe get readers to feel like they have access not just to
the journalists (us) but the scientist themselves, the journalist is
just a conduit. Thats something we very much would like to do.

Something else that, on our side of the equation, could have the biggest impact – Journal article tagging:
there are thousands of papers published every week – the ones that get
the most attention are the ones that have public relation articles
attached to them that spin them certain ways. One of the things we want
to do is have a vehicle for readers to tag journal articles they find
interesting, so that we can get outside of the PR treadmill.

[David] That’s an interesting beat-specific twist on something
I’ve encouraged the beat bloggers to look into: Have resources send
them links to articles related to the subject using a social news site.

This is probably something that all beat bloggers may encounter. There are two groups within the readership, your lay reader and then there are the specialists. In  our case the specialists are very specialized. That makes for an interesting sort of "addressing the audience problem."

I think that’s a big thing, how do you address both those
constituencies? That seems like a problem and a huge opportunity at the
same time. The hardcore scientists are really high value readers in
terms of news production, so the tagging idea is a way to tap them
better.

What tool are you going to use for this, Del.icio.us?

That’s the hangup. There is all this open access problem, most of
the science is behind firewalls, so we are not sure what the tool is. I
guess if they tag the abstract then we can do the leg work. Del.icio.us tags has been suggested, and it actually came to us through one of our readers:
I posted this question on the Facebook page and a reader suggested
getting creative with del.icio.us which is still our number one choice.

What other ideas are you working on?

The last thing we are working on: First we are doing blog profiles of our readers. They can show us the science blogs they have and we will cover them.

Then we are trying to figure out how to incorporate the wiki medium.
There are a few approaches I think we can take, one that would be cool
but hard to work is if we have readers contribute to articles
wiki-style. That might mean a rough draft that would normally go to the
conten editor would actually go to the Wired science page — a
pre-release that people could edit wiki style.

The problem is that news is time sensitive and it could be tough to build that into the process.

Or more generally: Have a Wired science wiki where people could
contribute ideas or things they are thinking abou, similar to
Geekepidia, but a functioning wikipedia instead of a static magazine
format so that it would be more interactive.

What advice do you have for other beat bloggers?

I think it pays to manage expectations within an organization.
Starting small for us was the way to go because I think it really does
take time to build momentum. It’s pretty hard for publications that
have dedicated readership to build a community that is actively
contributing to the news. We want to get people excited internally and
externally, but I don’t want to promise the moon and deliver nothing.

Also: Put more thought in the beginning with the tools. Right now I
have all this stuff on Google Reader but now we are moving to
Del.icio.us.  Also, I don’t know if I would have used twitter as a
microblogging platform — maybe I would have chosen a regular blog – I
feel that its so transient that its hard for people to see what’s going
on.

There should be regular content update. Build in time into each week to really work on some of these longer term things.  Have a dedicated push time for your Facebook page or whatever tool you are using, build it into your weekly or daily schedule.

You mentioned earlier and I want to ask: Do people lose interest quickly?

Yes, but when we do something new people regain interest. It’s very
easy to assume that what you are doing will be of interest, but when
time passes I’ve learned that’s not true – you have to drive interest.
You have to make it worth people’s wild. They have limited time, so you
have to provide real ways of interacting and provide things they
wouldn’t get elsewhere.