Today marks the third anniversary of the publication date of “Managing Online Forums.”

Last week, the book received it’s 50th five star review on Amazon.com. Overall, the book has received 53 reviews on Amazon.com and 61 across all Amazon sites, 57 of which are five stars. To say that this is cool to me and that this means something to me, is an understatement.

When you put something out there, you never really know how it’s going to be received. Writing a book that you truly invest of yourself into is like putting yourself out there to be judged. “Managing Online Forums” is my experience and my passion for online community and that it has been so well received is an incredible, wonderful thing to me.

TechCrunch’s Erick Schonfeld has an interview with myYearbook CEO Geoff Cook. myYearbook is a social network that launched live video chat in November. With some mileage behind the feature, Cook is ready to share some data and results.

At the time the feature launched, 1 of every 10 streams on Chatroulette was “obscene,” he says. Since then, however, Chatroulette has made progress. Recently, myYearbook reviewed 1,500 Chatroulette streams and found that there was an abuse rate of 1.9% (or around 1 in 50). Cook claims a rate of “less than 1 in 1000” for myYearbook, which serves up 750,000 video chat conversations a day.

You haven’t heard of WindowsLaunchpad.com, have you?

No, not the site that is on that domain name now. The Microsoft Windows enthusiast site that existed on it back in the early to mid-2000s.

You’ll have to forgive me, as I don’t know when it launched. I just know that it recently turned 10. I wasn’t an active member, though I did make some posts. So, why am I mentioning it?

Because WindowsLaunchpad.com is a memory and because it means something to me.

To delve into why is to get into community at it’s true essence, which is the connections we make with other people.

photo credit: joelogon

Last month, I wrote about the 10th anniversary celebration over at phpBBHacks.com, a site that I launched on April 6, 2001. In brief summary, this is what we did to celebrate:

• Launched a special, dedicated section of our website, with an RSS feed and added a special section to our forums (for a limited time).
• Celebrated over a 10 day period, in honor of it being the 10th anniversary.
• I wrote a series of 34 text articles, 3 of which including substantial writing from other people and more than half of which included interviews that I conducted with people.

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photo credit: mboperator

I have a fun idea. As you know if you’ve read ManagingCommunities.com for any measurable amount of time, I like to sometimes share the funny or absurd things that my members have told me. Whether that’s being called Hitler or people who are both wrong and rude, I share it in small doses.

Sometimes, we get gold from commenters of the blog. One example that comes to mind immediately is this comment by MsMod:

One of my favorite attacks ended with, “no doubt Hitler would embrace and adopt you as one of his own.”

Earlier today, the new music video for “Play Your Part” by Wale featuring Rick Ross, Meek Mill and D.A. Wallach of Chester French premiered on MTV.com. I really like this record and like the music video just as much – you can pick up a free download of the mixtape that the song is from at Ross’ website.

At last year’s Blog World Expo, I developed a panel featuring D.A. alongside rapper Asher Roth, my friend Wayne Sutton and myself. D.A. is a really cool guy – very nice, talented and smart – who has a great understanding of building community.

Anyway, in the new video, which I have embedded below, D.A. sings, “you think you’re using me, like this game’s new to me, but you ain’t confusing me … we’ll be cool as long as you just play your part.” So, today, I want to talk about how important it is that all members of your community play their respective parts.

photo credit: kastner

I’m a fan of both Jason Calacanis and Gary Vaynerchuk and Jason recently had Gary on his show, This Week in Startups. It’s an hour long, but if you are an entrepreneur or if believe in social business or online community, put aside some time. The clip is embedded below (warning: expletives).

A lot of what Gary discusses is related to online community and the business of building community. At one point, he discussed the ROI of caring and of doing good things – what a business will likely be doing if they are building online community and doing it well.

April Fools Day gives me an opportunity to have a little fun with the communities that I manage. For some of them, it’s a bit of a tradition because I have been doing it for so long. Let’s break down what I did this year.

As I mentioned in my last post, we are currently celebrating 10 years of phpBBHacks.com. It just so happened that our 10 days of celebration fell during April Fools Day. So, of course, we had to do something related.

I announced that, after looking through some old documents and e-mails, I had discovered that the site was actually 11 years old and that it predated phpBB itself. In other words, I was saying that phpBBHacks.com, the largest unofficial resource for phpBB, launched before development had even begun on phpBB.