Chapter 4Tools for Doing the Heavy Lifting…How to Power Your Community

The problem with writing about tools is that they change too fast. I can promise you that as soon as the ink hits this page, right when this book is rolling off the presses and into a box, headed for a store near you, at that very moment, one of the companies I mention in this chapter will go out of business, one of the products I criticize will put out a new version that nullifies everything I had to say about it, and one of the programmers I profile will get fed up with the web biz altogether and take up underwater basket weaving.

It’s a bet.

Still, no practical discussion of virtual communities would be complete without a glance behind the curtain at the gritty backend, ...

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