diving into the deep end.

maybe Pool's for blokes in dark sun glasses, with shady paranoia and fascinatingly funny wit like this guy, who gives quite a succinct intro into the ABC's world of Pool, or naked cyclists musing about the joys of - you guessed it - cycling.

all jokes aside, i was seriously skeptical. in my experiences, most of the best kinds of sites online are started by guys in the basement or art majors with too much idealism, not big corporations and professionals in suits (no offense intended).

but i gave it a go, probably course it's part of my project and joined Pool.

and, without sounding like i drank their kool-aid, i found myself enjoying purely exploring the material that people put up onto Pool. there were pictures, text, audio, some of them just vaguely related to the "official" projects up on the site. and some of these folks on display seemed like just the sort of people you need to have a vibrant community of media producers, full of stick-it-to-man attitudes and open debates about offensive material (without degenerating into haters espousing 'your mother is fatter than mine' troll stuff)

but unfortunately, the site's a little messy to navigate. i felt lost at first, trying to figure out where to click, or even how this particular work fits into the larger picture of one set of projects.

and i think the forum doesn't reflect the amount of eyeballs and users on the website, with just a handful of regulars (not few, but i think there are more) commenting and providing feedback to the Pool team on functionality or debating on the topics on the forum. read here, i really think veronique said it better than i can.

in short, the sense of a Pool community hasn't yet been cemented.

but the frequency and timely fashion that the Pool team replies to queries and try to soothe over some issues are astonishing frankly, considering how other forums mod take months to even get to replying - at least when i was looking through this forum thread.

so as social media producer for mytribe on Pool, it's got to be one of the major task to do, building a more vibrant collaborative eco-system, so it's not just a whole bunch of isolated pro-consumers but a real interchange of ideas and projects.

and here's my two cents worth.