Devlicio.us started as an idea for a catchy name. Have a good name, and a great blog site will follow, right? It'll grow like mold in a shower! Poof! Well, umm.
No. As many of the people who have tried and failed to start great new blogging sites will tell you, it's not easy. It's actually a very slow, difficult to manage process. The idea is to create a community that's thriving, where the members feel that they're taking part in a "whole is bigger than the sum" site. This can be very difficult to do, and easy to screw up.
The pitfalls are many. Too many bloggers with too much fluff content and your site gets dismissed as being too noisy. Too few bloggers, with not enough meat content, and you're dismissed as being irrelevant. A poorly designed skin, plain looking site, or broken blogging engine and you're not adding any value as an aggregated site.
I've got a few ideas about how to create a successful blogging site. Get some great, passionate bloggers, committed to an open dialogue about technology, willing to learn and teach each other. Provide them with the technical tools they need to get ideas out quickly. Create some branding to create the tide that raises all of the site's blogs. Promote the site with everything you've got, and you might, if you're lucky, have a site that is half as successful as our sister site, CodeBetter.Com.
So, the answer to the question "What's Going on at Devlicio.us" is:
We're trying to not screw things up. The best way to do this is, if you have the time of course, is to take things slowly. Thanks to Telligent Systems, we have Community Server 2.1 here at Devlicio.us. It's a great tool. Thanks to Jaxon Rice at Soup we have a really nice site skin. Thanks to some of my good friends in the .NET software development community, I've lined up some great bloggers. If you're a blogger, and you'd like to join us, get in touch at brendan.tompkins@gmail.com.
So we're making some steady progress here but we're just not there yet so registration to the site is currently by invitation only.. We should be launching in the next few weeks.
Stay tuned!