BricaBox Blog

One of our favorite BricaBoxers is Nichelle, and one of our favorite BricaBoxes is the Cupcakes BricaBox.

Today, we’re super proud of Nichelle, Allison, and Rachel (the other two Cupcakes Take the Cake bloggers) because they’re on Martha Stewart’s show!

That’s right, our favorite Cupcake gals will be on the top of the program airing today (1pm EST on NBC - check local listings).

Here’s a picture of them on the set:

And here’s their blog post about it.

Congrats ladies!

We’re demoing BricaBox at the NextWeb / NY Web 2.0 Meetup here in New York City tonight (info below)

At the event, we’ll be showing off some of the great new features coming up in our launch. Please come out to Webster Hall to support us and grab some free food, if you’re in the New York area.

Thanks.
N & K

The NextWeb’s NY Web 2.0 Meetup will be held tomorrow, Monday, February 18th, at Webster Hall. The event begins at 6:15pm and will have FREE FOOD (sponsored by Gusto), Free WiFi, drink specials, presentations, and informal networking before and afterwards. Presenting this month is/are:

1. Brian August, Webster Hall
2. Eric Litman, Washington VC
3. Nate Westheimer & Kyle Bragger, BricaBox
4. Michael Grushin, ReviewBasics
5. Sam Lessin, Drop.io

Please RSVP and let us know if you’ll be joining us for the event. Follow this link to RSVP: http://newtech.meetup.com/21/calendar/7115544. If you’re not a member, you may join by clicking here. You do not have to be a member to attend!

Photocredit: Willotoons

Hello friends, Kyle here with some news we’re pretty stoked about: we’re about to unleash we just unleashed some really awesome new functionality and a bunch of bug fixes for our pride and joy, BricaBox! For your reading pleasure, below you’ll find a brief list of the new stuff we rolled out this morning.

MultiContent
- Each BricaBox can now have multiple content types. Want to create your own version of 43 People, Places, and Things? Easy! Just add a content type for each. Each content type can have its own set of attributes, too. For instance, a Person might have a URL and no address, whereas a Place might have an address and no URL.
- Each content type can have its own custom layout. Just go to Manage > Blocks & Layout > Content Layout. You’ll be able to select which blocks appear for which types of content. Easy.
- Filterable content list on steroids

Community Features
- Profile comments + email notifications about ‘em (you can turn these off on your account settings page)
- Comment block now has pagination on the homepage

Engagement
- Engagement can now be toggled on and off for a BricaBox (e.g. if you’d like to disable voting on a Top 100 list)

User Interface & Bug Fixes
- Lots of UI enhancements + refinements
- A ton of backend tweaks and bug fixes

We’re really excited about where BricaBox is headed in the coming weeks and months, and you can expect more fixes, enhancements, and upgrades as we progress towards our January launch.

As always, please get in touch with us if you have any questions, feedback, comments, complaints, or otherwise; we’re all ears! I should note that a great deal of the features rolled out today are based directly on feedback from a group of very valuable people: YOU!

Cheers!

Seth Godin wrote today that the Online Community Organizer will be an “employee of the future.”

Well, that future is here — and some folks (Josh, Tara, Chris, etc) have been writing about it for sometime.

Here at BricaBox, we’re so sure that community engagement is mission critical we plan on making a community organizer Employee Number One, and will put a call out for resumes soon before launch time.

When that time comes, what are the things we’ll be looking for? Off the top of my head, our community organizer will be:

A Sociologist.

Knowledge of how community works is super important if you’re going to be working within one. I don’t care if you’re an amateur, bar-stool sociologist or if you took classes with Max Weber himself (or Angela Davis!) the community organizer must have a sense for community dynamics and be able to demonstrate it (like with blog postings!).

A Bricoleur.

A bricoleur deals with limited resources intuitively and in a way which is itself art. The art of bricolage is fundamental for BricaBox for two reasons. Firstly, and most obviously, because we are a start-up. We both have limited resources and thrive on dealing with limited resources. We believe that entrepreneurship is like making good french toast: too much batter is when you’re unnecessarily weighed down; too little batter is when you have nearly none at all. The second reason you must be a bricoleur as BricaBox’s community manager is because the BricaBox platform itself is a limited resource with predetermined features. However, the platform also has infinite applications, and finding new ones is where a true bricoleur will shine.

A (technology) Ambassador.

People who “get” technology speak differently than people who “kinda” get technology and those who “don’t get” technology. If you want to be an effective community organizer, you have to be able to natively speak all three (you wouldn’t do community organizing in a predominantly latino neighborhood without knowing Spanish!). Are you the one who got your mom to start blogging? Did you teach your friend what RSS is, or sign-up your book-club for a Google Group? If yes, then you’re a technology ambassador.

An Advocate.

One of the most important reasons to have a community organizer is to have a person focused on the needs of the community and the communication of those needs to the powers-that-be (that’s me and Kyle!). You must be able to stand on a chair and shout passionately about what your constituency needs, because even though you’re an employee of the company, community organizer is not a pseudonym for “Propaganda Artist.” Nonetheless, you also have to be up front explaining why the company does certain things, and even when the community is upset by things, you have to understand that while the community is right most of the time, it isn’t right all of the time.