ChasNote

Dell taps Techdirt’s Insight Community on a project that’s somewhere between a virtual focus group and a sponsored forum. As Techdirt’s Mike Masnick puts it:

“we’ve put together a site, sponsored by Dell, on The Future of Storage, which is powered by the Techdirt Insight Community. We’re building an ongoing conversation around the future direction of the storage market. You can join in the conversation itself just by heading straight to the site and commenting on the posts, but if you have experience with storage area network technology, you should join the community itself and submit your insight on where you think the market is heading. The best insights not only get published to the site, but can earn you quite a bit of money. Basically, you can be smart, earn a bunch of money and get recognition for being smart all in one shot. Tough to beat that. “

At the same time Dell has partnered with Ars Technica to sponsor the roll out of Ars Technica’s first-ever enterprise IT forum, The Server Room — “a dedicated place where discussion could take place around IT matters of interest to business and enterprise gurus”. Full transparency provided by Ars’s Ken Fisher:

“Effective immediately, we are opening The Server Room to the public (registration is required for posting access). We are proud to announce that Dell is sponsoring the launch of this new resource, and I encourage you to visit our sponsor, Dell’s The Future of Storage: ‘Insights into the rapidly evolving storage area network market.’”

Earlier this week Intel and Ars Technica teamed up on a new technology forum, one designed specifically to engage Intel engineers, tech leaders from companies such as Google and Rambus, tech journalists from Ars Technica and Real World Technologies, and the tech power-set that makes up the Ars Technica community — all in one place. Dozens of individual topics have sparked hundreds of posts from the Ars community, which have been read by thousands of others.

Separate from the conversations around visual computing and multi-core architectures, Jon Stokes, directing editor at Ars Technica, reached out to his readers for feedback on the concept. Is it OK to invite engineers from Intel — the sponsor — into an Ars forum? Here’s an excerpt of that conversation.

Reader: “Seriously, let’s not pretend that Intel’s sponsorship isn’t going to affect how the forum is moderated and beyond”

Jon Stokes’s reply is pretty convincing:

As Stokes suggests, the proof is in the pudding. This program only works for Intel if it also works for Ars, and it only works for Ars if it works for the Ars community. Since that’s all out on the table — and the community is watching — it’s hard to imagine the Ars Technica editors could let this conversation veer into an advertorial Intel pep rally. Partnerships work best when all the parties have skin in the game. I’m betting this partnership is going to work well.

Credits: Intel’s David Veneski, Universal McCann’s Kerri Vickers, Ars Technica’s Jon Stokes and Ken Fisher, and FM’s Josh Mattison and Jason Ratner put this sponsorship together.

According to analysis by Richard MacManus at ReadWriteWeb, Ars Technica is the source of 87 front page Digg stories in the past 30 days, making Ars the top source for Digg conversations. Gizmodo and Engaget are close behind, filling out the top three. TechCrunch, GigaOM, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb and Mashable are other FM sites in the top ten. These are the brands that start the conversations, while Digg spreads the conversation to a much wider audience.

Techmeme’s Leaderboard does a similar analysis of sites-of-origin for stories tracked by its service. For the past 30 days, the top ten (in order) is TechCrunch, CNET, Engadget, NY Times, Ars Technica, ReadWriteWeb, Silicon Alley Insider, WSJ, The Register, and PaidContent.

I like to see so many FM partners on PC Magazine’s list of Favorite 100 Blogs: Ars Technica, Boing Boing, The Bargainist, Core77, Dethroner, GigaOM, Make, Mashable, NewTeeVee, OhGizmo, Parent Hacks, TechCrunch, UberGizmo, Uncrate, We Make Money Not Art, and Web Worker Daily.