Chat Masters: For David Bohnett, chairman and...

Chat Masters: For David Bohnett, chairman and chief executive of GeoCities, there is one sure-fire way to develop successful online communities.

“More traffic and more content creates more traffic and more content,” said Bohnett, whose Santa Monica company encourages Netizens to create their own Web sites. “The more popular we are, the more popular we become.”

But exactly how to capture that traffic and become popular in the first place is still more of an art than a science, according to panelists discussing “New Constructs of Community” at the American Film Institute’s Digital Arts Workshop last week.

In the three years since people began logging onto the Web in significant numbers, the Internet’s pioneers have mostly learned what not to do when it comes to creating virtual communities.

For example, Jim Bumgardner, chief technology officer for a Westwood-based all-chat site called The Palace, said he has concluded that “the whole field of social engineering is a crock.” After designing The Palace with a series of themed lounges and hot tubs to facilitate small gatherings, he found that “people will go to the room where the people are” regardless of the virtual environment.

About 15 yellow smiley faces--simple graphic icons representing the chat participants--floated around in a mountaintop plaza as Bumgardner gave a demo of The Palace (https://www.thepalace.com). But there was virtually no conversation besides the perfunctory hellos and goodbyes as faces entered and left the room. One face even declared, “This is too slow” before departing.

At the veteran San Francisco-based online magazine Salon (https://www.salonmag.com), more than 70,000 readers have registered to take part in the nearly 2,000 conversations going on in the Table Talk chat area. Table Talk now generates 30% of the site’s traffic, and reader feedback has a substantial impact on the magazine articles, said David Talbot, Salon’s chief executive.

In perhaps the ultimate testament to its community-creating ability, Talbot reported that several groups of Salon book readers have met in person at Borders Books & Music stores throughout the country. (Borders is one of Salon’s sponsors.)

Bumgardner championed the notion of info-diversity (the online equivalent of bio-diversity) as a way of keeping Web sites interesting and encouraging online communities. One way to promote info-diversity, he said, is to offer “multiple channels of communication,” including real-time chat, bulletin boards and Web pages.

Meanwhile, the panel members expressed hope that the growth of Web-based “buddy lists”--programs that enable instantaneous two-way chat between people who are simultaneously connected to the Internet--would further spur the growth of online communities. “That will shift things from place-oriented communities to people-oriented communities,” Bumgardner said.