Uh oh, community manager has been called out! ;)

:-) because although I am the Community Manager for Kwippy, it is not the only community to which I belong.

What do you see as the difference in posts that are distributed by Ping.fm as opposed to originating from other sources?

Although you may belong to other communities, I would imagine that as a Community Manager for Kwippy, you ought to be driving growth here on the site. If all of your posts are originating from Ping.fm, you look just like someone who is using their service to blast messages to a hoard of different sites, just to get their message out.

Also, unless you are posting messages about Kwippy with Ping.fm, I don't see how broadcasting messages out to all of the other networks are necessarily helping to develop Kwippy's community.

It just seems that part of what Kwippy has done by creating their site is to give people a different way to look at microblogging, and a different interface, and a different way of interacting. If you yourself are not using the Kwippy interface, what would encourage other Kwippy users to do so?

I wish to keep all of my communities abreast of what I am doing, and for that I use Ping.fm. I do not see that the manner of posting kwipps changes their value.

What excites me about Kwippy and one reason why I am their community manager is that this platform encourages discussion building based on individual kwipps, regardless of their source.

I ask again, what do you see as the difference in posts on kwippy that are distributed by Ping.fm as opposed to originating from other sources?

The difference is that with Ping.fm you never have to visit the site. If you are posting directly via Kwippy, it tells me that you are posting something here, directly to the users of Kwippy.

Also, when I see a message posted via Ping.fm and it has been posted on several different platforms, how do I, the reader, know where to respond? What I am afraid of is that if I comment on something, the original poster may never see it because they are always broadcasting.

The reasoning behind my fear is that I see a lot of Kwips in the everyone stream from Ping.fm and hardly any of them seem to have comments. It makes me wonder if those users are posting via Ping.fm just to broadcast a message, or if they are using it simply because the interface is easier to manage. I've further expanded on this idea here: http://www.kwippy.com/microblink/kwips/2008/sep/10/053546/?src=kwipspage_plink

OK... that helps me better see your concerns.

Yep.. lots of people's posts on Kwippy don't have comments. Lots of people's posts on many services do not get responses. I can say that with authority as my posting the same message to many platforms leads me to easily track the type and quantity of replies.

You the reader can respond on the service that you feel most comfortable. If you only have a kwippy account then you would choose that as your place of response, the same being true were you on any single service. Having multiple platform choices the decision becomes a more individualized. People have favorite platforms for a reason. One of my goals is to discover why people prefer Kwippy, Plurk, Twitter, YouAre, Identica, etc, etc over the other choices.

If the other poster does not respond because they are broadcasting then it is unlikely the original poster will ever realize the full potential of kwippy or any other community to which they belong. An axiom about a community is that the more you invest in it the better it becomes for you and those with whom you interact.

The question that you posted on Sep 10 is an ideal one for sending out on Ping.fm.. as it seems that your main goal is to learn why people post using Ping.fm.

As you continue to develop your presence on Twitter, Pownce, Plurk, and kwippy (why are we not listed in the Participate section of your site?) you will get a different feeling of each of the communities. As Microblink is new to each of them I would be very interested to hear about your initial impression and how those impressions change with exposure and with site upgrades.

I hope this better answers your questions and addresses your concern. If you would ever like to do a blog on your site about this specific issue, community building, social networking or ?? Please let me know as I would gladly participate.

BTW am I talking with Rob, Mark, Mike, or a combination?

:-)

@kestrachern You make some great points and I feel like I have better understanding of how you are using Ping.fm with microblogging. These kinds of conversations are great to have and I applaud your willingness to engage.

The reason Kwippy is not listed under our 'Participate' section is because we are still trying to corral how we will be using each of these networks (and we're only a month old, so we've still got some things to tweak). That portion of our site will be getting reorganized soon.

Also, this is Mike. I do most of the microblogging under our various Microblink accounts.