They say the path to success is paved with failure. If so, I've sure been doing a lot of "paving"! :)

Allow me to explain:

Since October of 2004, I've been working on creating niche learning communities. The end goal is to create a system that can generate profitable niche communities on any and every conceivable topic. The system should also have a network effects component -- in other words, with each additional quality community that is built, value is created and shared across the entire network.

Thus far, I've wasted a little money and a lot of time chasing wrong ideas. Here's what I've learned:

• In order for this to work, cost of content production needs to be as low as possible. Reconstruction (i.e. reconstructing the online world; using APIs and RSS) can help to significantly lower cost of production
• Investing in the right ecosystems is essential for this to work -- an extremely important factor where the wrong decision can have an enormous opportunity cost
• I cannot invest in underdeveloped ecosystems, even if they are promising (wait until they get bigger)
• Forums are a great learning tool, and people will accept it as such
• vBulletin can function as a learning CMS
• vBulletin has the right infrastructure to allow the web site to be used to profile users
• The informalness of online communities is where the value is; people want the kind of conversation they can have in a bar with friends, where they do not constantly have to filter information based on the agenda of the information provider

Those lessons were learned over the course of building four communities: ActoGuitar, InformedForex, Acto911, and ActoAstrology. Smaller niches like Acto911 and ActoAstrology are essential to ensure that we can profitably invade the smallest possible niches. Cost of community production is still the primary concern. For instance, ActoGuitar, due to the original content it has, cost far more to produce than the others; it took about a month just to generate all the audio and video content. ActoAstrology and InformedForex both took about 10 working days from start to finish. Acto911 took three days -- although one lesson I learned in creating that community is that SimpleMachines, while it is a promising forum CMS, does not yet have the vibrant ecosystem needed to build a business on top of it. Also, like most content management systems, it entirely disregards importing RSS feeds -- a woeful albeit all too common condition -- and the developers' community has not really picked up the slack too much on this issue. So I'll need to re-do the Acto911 site (plus a lot of videos on the site are currently broken since Halifaxion got booted from YouTube...Halifaxion was the man, he used the power of video sharing sites to drop truth bombs on all ya'll!!! A hall of famer in the info war! But fortunately, only one soldier in an army of millions....so fear not, the truth will prevail!).

The fifth community that has been built is ActoElection -- a community designed to cover the 2008 US Presidential Election. A comparison of ActoElection with the other ActoCommunities reveals that ActoElection has a bit of a different structure to it. As I am pushing cost of production down, I am looking to develop a standardized protocol for community creation and management. These standards are important as they will serve as the basis by which web workers will be able to use loose online social connections to form online business alliances, and to deepen and strengthen their relationships. In other words, standardization will allow for peer production, which in turn will allow for lower cost of production. I like to think of it as a governance system for peer production, which is one of the things I'm banking on being "the next big thing."

I am a bit excited about ActoElection because it will be a site we do a bit more marketing for, particularly social media marketing (i.e. the blogosphere, Digg, YouTube, social bookmarking, etc). You can even see me in non-kook mode here (although my colleague David will be doing virtually all of the blogging/social media marketing). For the other ActoCommunities, we've done little to no marketing at this point.

As costs of production continue to fall, we'll be accelerating production. I'll report back as I do more "paving." :)