Every community has its culture, codes and private jokes… You will have a hard time finding any board without threads full of links to youtube videos or lolcatz.

Ever wondered what jokes community managers share when they need to relax?

See the penguins video and the cowboy herding cats video.

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I played a little game today, trying to know who is winning the US primary at Digg. I took all the popular stories for the last 30 days, and then categorized them - the pro-Obama on one side, the pro-Clinton on the other side, and three other categories for the remaining stories: republican, results announcements and neutral. Here are the results:

I expected some lead for Obama, but this was an impressive result. 146 of the 227 popular articles (64%) were, in a way or another, in favor of Obama. Clinton could account for only 14 articles (6%). And I haven’t counted the results announcements in Obama’s results - most of them were of course very good news to him over the last month.

I’ve also counted the total number of votes each of them have got:

The results are very similar. In fact, the average number of votes on articles for each candidate are very close:

One way to explain this would be to say there was a lot more interesting news Obama’s side than on Clinton’s, at least from a Digg user’s point of view. If the Clinton voters were outnumbered on Digg, the gap between the number of votes on pro-Clinton and pro-Obama articles would probably be larger.

In any case, this clearly shows that Obama’s campaign is making a better job at targeting the typical Digg audience, sending a message that is more appealing to the Internet-savvy voters. Most of the Clinton messages only reaches the Digg readers through counter attacks from Obama’s camp.

Clinton may whine after the professional journalists that talk more about Obama than her; attacking Internet citizen journalists would be much harder.

Note: You can download the stats & charts from here. Comment if you find mistakes!

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In some jobs, the day you quit is the day you can all forget and move on to something completely different. In community management, this is simply impossible.

I often wondered why I was going on managing Ryzom, or why I had even launched Ryzom.org, an initiative aimed at making the Game bought back by its community. This week, again, an umpteenth rebound in the rocambolesque procedure of liquidation took me two days of work for a very light outcome.

I’m not breaking any news when saying that being in a community is a high addiction. Every community behaves its own different way and once you belong to one community, getting away from it is just like dumping a beautiful lover. Hard not to ask for news now and then, not to feel jealousy when seeing another one taking care of her, to realize than she doesn’t need you anymore, not to feel concerned or care when she needs help.

But there is something more. In the case of Ryzom, my affinity and current priorities are in fact of little importance : It is a duty in which I cannot fail. Even if this is not always pereceived, a community manager is always tied to an imperative against which he cannot do anything : the fidelity he feels towards his community.

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