Ask The CEO: I am Live On Gather From 12-1pm (ET) Today To Answer Your Questions

Tom - I found Gather recently and I absolutely love it. Thank you and your team for creating it. I wanted to know if there is a way for me to email a bunch of my friends, more than 5 at a time to join Gather.

Tom, do you see Gather adding functionality down the road for members to 'gather' in the real world? (similar to Meetups.com)

Hey Tom,

I know Gather Points are still in the works. Any thoughts on partnering with charitable organizations so that Gatherers can donate their points/dollars?

thanks,
-Laura

Alexis- thanks for joining us! We are working on revisions to our invite system now that will allow comma-delimited lists (lists of email addresses separated by a comma) to be used. We will also make it easy for you to import your address books from various mail clients and services.

What steps have you taken to combat trolling, offtopic posting and general craziness on your comments section? Seeing a karma point system or post rating would be a great feature.

Hi Kevin- Thanks for the question. Gather members clearly responded to our groups functionality. 400 groups were created in under a month. More go live every day.

Enabling groups to operate (generally) is a key focus for us. This includes allowing document posting, calendaring/event scheduling, and member lists. Stay tuned for groups 2.0 functionality (and help us define it at improve.gather.com)

Love the question Laura- it's more than a thought! We will start allowing charitable donations as soon as points go live. To qualify, charities must be registered 501c3s (this includes most non-profits, schools and churches) and have a Gather group with at least 100 members.

That's our starting point. We'd love suggestions about how else to help charitable organizations across the country!

Thanks, Tom for taking this on. Do you know you are contributing to sleepless nights for many of us? We're either on line with yu, or we're thinking of what to write next! I think you're keeping up nicely with the little glitches that need attention. I just started a group about Gather Etiquette that I hope will help newcomers and others with their postings as well as working to keep conversation civil, and messages in our inbox to a minimum. I hope it helps too. Miss Noetal is going to write a column under that group every once in a while and hopefully others will chime in. Miss Noetal Tells is ready to help any time.
One glitch I'd like attention on is the Search. I'd like to be able to put in a tag there , not just an article name. Maybe it's already possible. I haven't tried lately. I found ways around it. Also I posted the template in Miss Noetal's article, for people to provide a link, but maybe you could find another more simple way for people to put in links.

Thanks again , Gather staff for your most powerful "addiction!"

My last question of the day centers on the future of Gather, and the envisioned member population. Will Gather be primarlily geared toward a membership of authors, or will later versions of Gather accommodate other content providers as well? What does the future of Gather look like?

Jamie- You get karma points just for asking the question. :-)

Seriously, though, we are aware of a number of potential areas of abuse in the community (message or invite spam, fishing, off-topic comments, tag spamming) and are thinking seriously about a karma system that rewards good members and restricts activities of those with low karma.

One of the other options on comment spamming that we are considering is allowing article authors or image posters to moderate their comments, removing those that are inappropriate.

We'd still allow anyone to publish original comment, but this change would prevent abuse of the comment system. What do you think? Are their other alternatives you prefer?

Hi Tom -
I know a lot of people on the Gather site share their interests in music. I was wondering what's the best way to find out who else likes the same music I do?
Thanks!

Kevin- we plan to allow other media types in the near future (images are already growing quickly for us). Audio and video are in our mid-term plans (both streaming and download). Did this answer your question?

The idea of allowing posters to moderate their comments--while certainly well-intentioned--could be dangerous. Many people on Gather seem to be so sensitive to honest criticism (I'm not talking about ratings assassins or trolls, of course), that they could abuse such a system so that only the most glowing things would be posted about their work.

Tom, I know that Gather has subscribed to some wonderful syndicated Columnists, and now Deborah Tannen, an author. Are there any plans in the works to promote Gather authors from within, I think Radio was mentioned a few weeks ago as a possbility down the road - is there any talk of connections to Radio, Newspapers and the like for Gather authors? I'm sure enquiring Gather minds want to know...

For comments, I prefer a Karma-based rating system. Simply removing posts doesn't mitigate the root cause of the problem, and allows for censorship of opinion by the publisher.

Zenith- thanks for calling this one out. Our editor filters articles for special characters and programming code that might appear. It also removes characters that some word processors (like MS Word) use that might not display properly for some users. This second filter is most likely causing the issue you are seeing.

Our editor isn't perfect. We are working on improvements for the editor and will keep you posted in the improve.gather.com forum.

In the meantime, please email feedback@gather.com and we will see if we can give you a hand if you are seeing this regularly. Apologies for the inconvenience.

Tom, my question on the future of Gather, and content, didn't quite get the answer I was looking for. However, time is short, and there are others banging at your door, so I will ask this of you at a later time, offline.

Thanks Carol V, for helping keep conversation civil. We can discuss and disagree on Gather, but there are thoughtful (and less thoughtful) ways to do it. I will check out the group!

Search now indexes tags, so articles tagged with a keyword will show up in search results for that tag. Let me know if you see anything different.

Josh- short term, we are focused on allowing people to search content that you share publicly in your profile. This means that you will be able to find people that share your love of a certain group or a type of music (jazz, for instance).

Longer term, we'd like to let you share what music you listen to, what you rate most highly, and find people who love just what you do...today.

This is an awesome forum - will you do this frequently?

Candida and Johnny 5000- I think these are both good points. They call out the two sides of the issue that we recognize and are trying to balance. Freedom of Speech is a core principle for us here at Gather. Building an engaged, informed, respectful (and fun!) community is equally important.

Comment removal or hiding, of some sort, is important to prevent spam comments, commercial comments, and off-topic comments. The question is how to manage this.

Internally, we have debated this for weeks (no joke!) and have, I believe a proposal to share with the community. I will post it later this week in improve.gather.com -- I encourage you both to give us your thoughts there!

Tom, I'm late and just catching up.. thanks for being here. I don't have a question, but want to voice my agreement with Johnny regarding removing comments others make. As much as trolls annoy me, I would rather see Gather watch for obvious trolls who contribute nothing but insults. I agree with Johnny, some would remove any comment that wasn't flattering, or didn't agree with the autor's POV and I think that would harm the real discussions I enjoy seeing here.

Hi Tom,
It is good to be able to connect again after a couple of years of separation. Since joining, I can't help but to be amazed at the great creative energy that encircles GATHER.COM -- people, ideas, content.

I run a few emerging community websites and would like to see a couple of things down the road:
* RSS headline feeds to my websites, subscribing by groups
* Spanish/English support (labels/instructions/tag translation)
* I am not pleased with my current Forum engine -- what about plans for "seamlessly" linking to the GATHER.COM discussion engine instead? (I know the tech issues with what I am asking for!)
* If I wanted to put banners to GATHER.COM on my websites, where would I find them?
Keep up the great work!

Zenith, if you copy and paste your content from MS Word (or whatever word processor you are using) into Notepad and then paste it into the Gather publishing tool, it will eliminate all of the HTML formatting that Word automatically puts in. This should fix your problem. Darn that Bill Gates ;)

Tom, I also think giving authors the ability to delete comments from their articles is dangerous and will be misused no matter how well-intentioned.

One thing I don't like is that when an image is uploaded to the site, it is automatically resized to the width/height Gather wants it to be. If the original image is smaller than the preferred Gather size, the image should be left as is. If the image is larger, perhaps you can resize it to make it smaller and then add a popup link to view the full size of the image.

All right, Tom. I reluctantly accept your implied offer to be the infallible across-the-board comment moderator on Gather. When do I start?

Kathryn, the best thing about Gather is you. We absolutely want to showcase our authors and are working on a number of ways to do that. We are testing advertising that features Gather members. We are working on media partnerships that would call out Gather contributors. And we are considering publishing relationships that would compile the best of what is shared on Gather.com (stories, recipes, travel guides, images, art) and create printed or electronic works (in each case, with member permission, of course!)

What else could we do to help Gather members achieve greater recognition?

Hey Tom,

Any chance any of us will ever get rich out of all this? Or should we just keep doing it because we like it?

Michael E- You bet! In fact, a member has asked that we publish a monthly "State of Gather" update, calling out our progress, our plans, and the things the community can do to help.

I am planning to start this in May and will set-up a forum after each monthly post for exactly this kind of discussion. Hope you will join us!

Good afternoon--I started this and then went to the HELP desk for some additional info and it disappeared!

Basic message-I really enjoy Gather although I am not particularly technically competent. Is there away to travel between the HELP area and a message in progress?

Thanks,
Ann

A little forward thinking, but for future charities to be able to receive "points" funds from Gather, should the charity be set up as its own namespace/login, or can any user become the "administrator" of the charitable donations?

Tom,

One of the best aspects of Gather is that, unlike Myspace, the focus is in the writing. Many authors here write short stories, some of which are actually good. Any chance of working with Void or some other type of magazine to publish and expose the authors here? (of which i am one)

I don't know about greater recognition, but think a quick list of published article titles without having to scan through pages of author information would help others find an author's work.

It would also be cool to have a "Sandbox" (not sure if this is the right terminology), where you could store articles/pics that you really like or want to read in the future - your own virtual library of your favorite or waiting to be read Gather stuff.

Fernando! Welcome, my friend. It's been too many years. I trust all is well with you and your family in Pennsylvania.

Here are some quick answers. More to come as details emerge:
1) RSS headline feeds to my websites
RSS headline feeds are something that we plan to allow mid-year, both for member headlines (things you publish), group headlines (what's published in a group) and tag headlines (what's published in a tag).

Before that, we will also allow regular bloggers off-Gather to publish on Gather as well, by picking-up complete feeds of their content via RSS and automatically reposting it in Gather.

2) Subscribing by groups
You can subscribe to groups now on Gather and receive notification of when something is posted (each time it's posted to that group). See the group page to subscribe and your "Preferences" under "My Info" to set-up your email preferences.

* Spanish/English support (labels/instructions/tag translation)
We are currently exploring wiki translation to make Gather's interface work worldwide. The next step, of course, is content filtering by language. It's a end-of-year item for us.

* I am not pleased with my current Forum engine -- what about plans for "seamlessly" linking to the GATHER.COM discussion engine instead? (I know the tech issues with what I am asking for!)

Remote groups deployment is our newest, common request. No news yet, but we are discussing it.

* If I wanted to put banners to GATHER.COM on my websites, where would I find them?

On the way soon...for Gather, your own page, and your groups. We're working on development estimates for linking systems now.

Please keep in touch!

I'd love to flag articles to be kept informed by email when activity occurs on them. Sort of a bookmarking feature for the consummate readers at Gather.
Thanks.

Mark- Gather shares our revenue back with members so as the community grows, compensation will continue to grow. By our estimates, we will have a handful of members that break the $1K mark/month in April. Dozens more will make hundreds of dollars.

We are, candidly, really excited by the economic potential of Gather long term. I can't wait to hear that we have someone who has managed to start earning a living on Gather, like they do on eBay today.

Good afternoon everyone, Unfortunately Tom has a hard stop at 1pm ET but he will post answers to the remaining questions later today. Thank you all for your participation. We will definitely schedule another discussion with Tom in the near future.

Kat- I will raise it with our tech team. Please post it as a suggestion to improve.gather.com as well so we have it documented separately there; it's an important request for serious photographers/artists, I am sure.

Great to see you on Gather!

Mom- the easiest thing to do is open two browser windows side-by-side. We are working on some in-line help, but it's not available yet.

I'll give you a shout by phone to help (we have special customer service for CEO Mom's :-)

For more information on the Karma comment rating system discussed here today, this link provides a rather good explanation.

Gang- Lisa is kicking me out of here to head to a meeting, but I will be back on in a few hours to post answers to the questions I was unable to get to. Thank you all for your participation and please continue to share your thoughts and suggestions on improve.gather.com.

interesting ;-)

I was wondering, do ya'll offer internships for lowly young naive college students like myself?

Sandy- Thanks for the additional voice on comments. Stay tuned for our proposal on improve.gather.com - we'd love your thoughts there!

Candida- One follow-up on preventing negative messages sent through email. we do allow you to "block senders" of email, so that you will not receive messages from them in the future. To do so, hit the "block senders" link that appears next to their name in an email you receive.

E.B. - bookmarking is in the relatively near-term plan as well. We expect to let you make those bookmarks public, if you want to show people your reading list, or keep them private. We will also let you comment on them, so friends can see why you liked/disliked a piece.

Progress Charity- Thanks for joining Gather! There are actually two ways for charitable organizations to benefit from Gather participation.

1) Charities that have good information (for example, a not-for-profit focused on disease recovery or energy conservation) might have excellent content and a limited ability to distribute it. Publishing content on Gather gives that organization the ability to publish content, earn compensation (in points, if they are earning below $50/month or cash if they earn more), and use that compensation as they choose.

2) Starting in May, we will also allow Gather members to donate to 501c3 charities if they choose to do so. To accept donations, charities must operate on Gather, forming a Gather group for their community, their organization, their supporters, and their colleagues in the space. Once this group recruits 100 new Gather members, the group is eligible for donations. More details will be forthcoming on the donation front shortly.

Charles L- thanks for contributing to Gather! We are building a number of relationships in the publishing space, both with book publishers and magazine publishers. We hope to work with publishers to build recognition for talented members of the community, create new revenue streams for Gather and our contributing members, and bring new talented people to Gather.

We will keep you posted as these come to fruition.

Kat- See my note above regarding bookmarks. We definitely hope to enable that in the near future. Would you want a list of bookmarks of content just on Gather, or a list of things you read on the web (off Gather) that you can share and explore?

Joshua- you bet! Are you technical, marketing, customer service, other? Drop me a note and I will put you in touch with our team.

Sandy- thanks. We are already working on a way to make it easier to get to scan lists of the articles you want. It's part of our "site simplification" efforts. More soon!

I would personally only use it for bookmarking stuff on Gather. I had not thought of bookmarking other web content. I don't really like the idea of linking off Gather to other sites, but that's the web marketing/web designer in me talking. I've always felt that **most** offsite links are a bad idea because they take your customer/user from your site to someone else's.

In my case if there was web content out there I found relevant, I would more likely publish an excerpt here along with my commentary on it as an article and provide the offsite link in the article (opening in a new window of course - which I would recommend that you do on any offsite links authors include in any articles, comments or pics automatically as many people do not know how to do this themselves). You could make something like this part of the bookmarking feature. I also think this would need to have the ability to be author categorized to give each user the flexibility to organize their own Gather library to their needs.

I also like the idea of adding a little note as to why you liked it and are bookmarking. Good for others, as well as a reminder to self.

Candida- We are tracking down a couple of back-end issues, so it's likely on our side. Apologies for the performance hit.

Are you on the Verizon Fios network by any chance? I am thinking of moving to that in my home.

Tom, with a 12 hour time difference, I missed this live session - I would have liked to have been part of it. But such is the reality of living half a world away from live events overseas from me.

But I'll toss this in after the event:

Please make the publishing aspect of Gather more functional - it is just too limited as it is, regarding:
1. Cut and paste from MS Word - this has to be first UNFORMATTED in Word before copying and pasting to Gather, where the formatting options are very, very basic - to put it kindly.
2. Once published, the sequencing of articles is according to most recent posting - which is fine for blogging site. But Gather members are writers, and such sequencing is just not appropriate and very hard to work around with series of stories, poems or whatever which need to be sequenced according to storyline.
3. Writers organizing their published posts is not really catered for at all, resulting in growing, endless lists of items. Folders, as in Windows, would be a godsend.

I won't go on - I think I might have missed this particular boat of opportunity because of the time zones differences.

Magi

As with Nicola I am half a world away and so slept through this session.
My two cents:
* I am all in favor of incorporating a method of styaying in contact with particular threads as they develop without having to race to the preferences.
* Like Sandy i am totally against the idea of editing comments. Trolls need to be dealt with on a macro rather than micro level.
* A time zone clock on the front page would be helpful.
* FTP functionality would be of assistance to us steam driven operators way out in the boondocks.

I TAKE THIS OPPORTUNITY TO CONVEY MY THANKS TO THE GATHER STAFF FOR THEIR PROMPT AND PATIENT ASSISTANCE REGARDING SEVERAL RECENT PROBLEMS REGARDING SPAM, ATTRIBUTION ...ETC.

Tom,
I wasn't able to chime in live, so I've just read all the comments posted here and your responses. There's a heapin' helpin' of positive ideas posted here on both sides of the comments.
It is definitely motivational to read the quality input from fellow Gatherers as well as your responses. The combination is a really nice package !

Tom - Just want to say I love your comment:

"We are testing advertising that features Gather members. We are working on media partnerships that would call out Gather contributors. And we are considering publishing relationships that would compile the best of what is shared on Gather.com (stories, recipes, travel guides, images, art) and create printed or electronic works (in each case, with member permission, of course!)

What else could we do to help Gather members achieve greater recognition?"

I'd say:

- continue with contests - but make sure they are well planned and with good incentives.

- Change our homepages to be more like I mentioned in my article in Building a Better Gather - Homepage as a Writer's Resume - Can We Have More Control?


- Maybe work something out with a publisher to work out Gather's version of American Idol - but call if American Writer - with the winner receiving a contract from the publisher? Like American Idol, it could look for well rounded writers, with different writing themes or styles each week for the narrowed contestants to participate in. One week could be short story, the next could be sonnet, the next journalism. Or it could all be for Fiction writer's, let's say, if that is what the publisher is looking for, but each week the theme changes. You get the idea. Your final twelve would be chosen from submissions given to the three judges - not from Gather but from the publishing industry. Perhaps from the publisher itself? Maybe Random House would go for this since you have struck a relationship with them?

- Let Gather members do commercials for you. Once we start getting to spend points and the checks come in, those that get checks are going to be the motivation to all others to join, write more, read more, invite more. This will not only give recognition to the Gather members who have done well on the site, but will give recognition to Gather at the same time.

I think that one thing that could help is if folks inside gather could create a group to help us promote our pages, and the site. We would all benefit. I can think of things already, but you guys know best what will get us more points.

Maybe between the writing community of Gather, and the Gather staff, we can build a promotional guide, and have the Gather Guerilla Marketing group.

Hmmm... [goes off to create a group]

see http://evangelize.gather.com/

*gryn* I love this place.

Thanks Shava, what a good idea!

Re: moderation of article comments. Why not let the reader do the moderation? In principle, everyone should be able to respond to an article in comments. of course, you are talking about a great deal of functionality that could be added to make it easier for the reader to filter. For starters, I think it would be neat if an opinion article had a poll-like functionality built-in that would allow each comment to post as either "I Agree", or "Disagree", or "Neutral". Then you could view all three subcategories in three separate columns down below, or you could magically toggle to see the comments one category / response type at a time. (Can you tell I used to be a geek?)

Oh, I get it now. If someone is just placing random gibberish totally unrelated to the article, then I agree with Candide...1) remove their worthless comment, 2) give them a warning, 3) give them a chance to redeem themselves, and 4) block their username from future postings. After a while, they will tire of re-applying for membership...LOL!

I love gather. I have opprtuinity to express myself beyond imagination.
One things bore me now. I am not recieving any feed back from gather in my Email box instead they flood into Spam and I don't have time for spams.