With all the social networks that have been popping up all over the place, by now you are probably wondering how hard is it really to build a social network? The Answer, not that hard, especially with Drupal in your backpocket. I’m going to start with the easiest social network to build, the Blog Community Website. You can liken this to the a Xanga or a Livejournal type site. I’m actually a very big propenent of the Xanga model over the Myspace model because it tends to bring a greater loyalty to a site. In addition it not only promotes loyalty because your users are blogging frequently but it also produces much better content. And we all know better content, equals mo’ money. I’ll get to the bottom line in a later post, but essentially if you have Google Adsense near a content rich blog post those ads are going to do 10-20x better than that very same ad on myspace. This is the sole reason that Myspace is selling sub $1.00 CPMs.

Building your Very own Blog Community:

Step 1: Install Drupal

Since the basic Drupal install comes with the blog module and multi-user support it is the ideal CMS to create a Community of Blogs.

Step 2: Activate the Blog module

Make sure to modify the settings so that each user can have a blog. This will give you a multi-user website with their own personal web blog.

Step 3: Install TinyMCE WYSISWYG Editor module

After you activate the TinyMCE module (and I realize this in itself is a challenge) then make sure to configure the module so that you can use the editor in blog posts.

Step 4: Install Image Attach module (this is up to you, use whichever image handing module works best for you)

A blog without images is a dull blog indeed. Yes, yes poetry is nice and all, but a picture does say a thousand words.

Step 5: Embrace your Creativity!

So now that the foundation of your community is set up nicely, it is all up to you on how creative you want to get with your mini xanga. Here are some things off the top of my head:

• Create Community Tags
• Give each user a Blogroll
• Install Buddylist so that each blogger can pick which user blogs they like and be updated on each other’s posts.

And the list can go on and on, so have fun with it and good luck. If you’d like me to go more into detail, as in step-by-step, just leave a comment and I’ll make sure to post them steps.

Ajax Blogs cms cpms drupal google adsense livejournal Myspace Online Advertising Social Networking Startup School Startups tinymce web 2.0 web blog xanga

share this story