CNO (Chris Norman), moderator at Flash Kit is responding to my article: Flash Kit Community – Flashkit is going under?
To make such a broad and sweeping statement to sell your own ideas is somewhat reminicent of the infamous “Flash is 99% bad” soundbite.
The new weblogging trend is great for developers – I make JD and Mike’s a daily read. But I really get the impression from “articles” like this that the Wired article has created some inflated egos, and in the same respect, I think the market for Flash-related weblogs is already becoming oversaturated just weeks after the MX studio announcement (sort of like when everybody and their mother had a Flash community site, but only the ones which provided real value survived).
I just thought the community that is hundreds of thousands of members strong might like a chance to respond to a statement which was made on a semi-obscure blog. Is this akin to the “Slashdot is going under” wolf-cries which seem to happen every other month?
Chris, I don’t think any of the people covered in the Flash Blog story on Wired had or has gotten inflated egos. I know them to be down to earth people wanting to share their knowledge with the rest of the Flash community. When it comes to my ego, I will leave it to others to judge if its overly inflated or not. The Wired article in question did nothing to inflate my ego, but it did warm to see them paying attention to the great work being done by the Macromedian Bloggers.
When it comes to the lifelyhood of Flash Kit, I am not going to go into e-mail exchanges I have had with people at Flash Kit in the past, but I think its pretty obvious to most people in the community that there are very few resource sites that are making money right now.
This is a very interesting discussion, as Flashmagazine are very soon looking forward to paying big money for hosting. I wish I could blame that for not updating the articles-section more often :)
Bandwidth is the issue that threatens most of the community sites. We’ve already had a couple good articles that could not be posted, due to bandwidth issues. If Macromedia could help out on this issue, that would ensure the survival of many community sites. Mike and John, could you think about a solution for this? Some sort of media vault without limitations for community sites?
J,
Thanks for responding. :) I admit that the first post in that thread was written in the “heat of the moment”, but I’m an opinionated guy, so that’ll happen from time to time.
That having been said, I think the coversation about how to keep community sites alive *is* an important one. I took issue more with your addressing Flashkit specifically, since the big names are always easy to pick on (Microsoft, anyone?), and wanted to give the community a chance to respond. And I think what you saw there is that people are willing to pay for a service they feel is valuable to them.
Now, certainly I wouldn’t expect all of the people making promises in that thread to follow through on them. But the thing is that even a small portion of a giant community is a lot of people. But rather than trying to survive donation to donation, Flashkit is lucky to have the backing of a corporation who, while they can get a little unwieldy sometimes, do not come down on the content, source materials, or amount of storage on the site, and instead promote it through things like conferences (which would be incredibly difficult to do as a solo webmaster).
Now, I’m not at all a spokesperson for Flashkit, and you said you didn’t want to get into it, so let’s focus on the real issue at hand. :D
I posted a thread on Chris’ Flazoom board re: the website maintanance costs, if only because there are so many sites out right now that I can only visit a few a day. :)
Though I would always rather see too many sites re: Flash than too few.
Unfortunately, at the end of the day, I don’t have a “solution” for the problem of high hosting costs, just a bunch of suggestions. I do think that a great deal of commitment and effort has to be put in to a community site to give it a focus and vision, and foster a sense of community, so that the same news isn’t just being recycled from Macromedia press releases. Any site with a community of users is one with a bunch of potential contributors, all with different ideas.
I would like to see more sites which address specific needs, akin to Flashcomponents.net, and I would hate to see Flashmagazine go because of their in-depth articles and interviews on a wide breadth of topics.
If you would, please check out the comments I made on Flazoom http://www.flazoom.com/cooler/1021389183,87877,.shtml
Thanks,
-Chris
I am happy the discusion is back on the topic of what we can do to make the flash resource sites survive. I have been reading all the comments here and on Flazoom, and I think I have at least one suggestion that I hope Macromedia will listen to. Stay tuned for the very un-revolutionary idea :-)