Online Communities seem to have been all the rage for a few years between 1999 and 2003. Several books and online articles were written, with community builders reflecting on their methods and sharing tips with others. The online communities of this 'golden age' were usually built around some flavor of forum, messageboard, listserve, or chatroom, and much of the advice to be found is geared toward that kind of centralized community. Around 2002, blogs and social software started gaining popularity, and they began replacing forums and messageboards as the drivers of communities online. Blogs and Social Software drive different kinds of communities from chatrooms and forums: they are decentralized and emergent. Blog Communities form between bloggers who link to, and comment on each other's blogs, but without a truly shared space. Social software sites are huge collections of personal profiles, and although myspace has 'space' in the title, that space is the member's own, not the community's. The community forms through connections between user's individual profiles, and in the comments users leave for each other, and not in a central, common area. However, many Social Sites do enable groups, and provide discussion forums where users can inhabit a shared space. Traditional Forum-based communities are alive and thriving, and new types of centralized communities are popping up, often in particular niches such as professional communities of practice, and sometimes around the comment threads of a particularly popular blog. Indeed, in many cases, building a centralized community still makes sense, especially when you want to focus on a particular subject matter for a particular audience. People have different styles of being social, and the 'all about me' style of blog communities and social networking sites may not be everyone's cup of tea. Forums still provide a comfortable  'place'  to go, and in some cases they provide the authority created by a centralized community of knowledgeable people. The "old-skool" tips and tricks for building centralized communities are therefore still relevant, and a few key points or themes run through them:

1. Building an Online Community takes a dedicated champion, someone whose job or passion it is to devote a lot of time and energy into growing the community, reaching out to new members, keeping in touch, provoking new discussions, dealing with issues and conflicts. This person has to set an example, and be patient, friendly, and fair, and recognize that the community belongs to the users: the champion's job is to grow it, not govern it from the top.
2. Start small and simple, with a clear purpose, and a clear idea of who you are building the community for, and then actively recruit your first users from people you know will provide good content. Focus on quality, not quantity. Add features only as it becomes clear they are needed, and be ready to scrap things that aren't being used.
3. Ensure a robust communications channel and feedback loop between members and managers/moderators. Consider having a dedicated space for feedback and issue tracking on the site itself.
4. Make sure the community feels empowered, and foster a sense of ownership among members. Members must have progressively more powerful roles and more responsibilities, in a life cycle from newbie to manager/moderator.  You should, in fact, be actively looking for others to take it over from you.

1. Be an active participant in the social networks of your audience. You need to go to where they are, be seen, and contribute. Comment on blogs, post content to social media sites, and tag everything.
2. Understand how networks work, and what they do. Be clear about what you are trying to achieve. Are you using a network to filter information or to amplify it? Is the goal of your networking efforts to provide a professional community with quality information, or is it to disseminate a message more broadly? Who are the hubs of the networks you belong to? Does it make more sense to try to connect to the hubs, or connect with other less connected nodes, and become a new hub?
3. Establish your niche, and don't try to be everything to everyone. Don't try to compete with large social networking sites.
4. Consider using existing tools and Sites instead of building your own. Content Management Systems and Blog software provide many of the features you need, without the high cost of developing them from scratch. Creating a group on an existing popular social networking Site might be a strong alternative to building your own community Site.
5. Partner, collaborate, and share. Find other networks and communities relevant to your purpose and find ways to provide increased value to each other's member's through affiliation, cross-linking, and shared content.