Eight Secrets of Effective Online Networking

Micah Sifry, executive editor of Personal Democracy Forum, an online “hub for the conversation already underway between political practitioners and technologists,” observes of the über-successful political blog Daily Kos, “[It] started as one person’s blog, and that person, Markos Moulitsas, spent untold hours building his community. He once told me that in the early days, when he had maybe several hundred regular readers, he knew the names of every single one and would notice when someone hadn’t been on the site for a while, and when they returned, he’d greet them personally. It takes that level of leadership engagement to build a successful [social network] around activism.”