Which choice?  What is the latest news?

We brought Table Talk abruptly into a paid subscription model! This was dicey on many fronts. The change had to be done swiftly, and in conjunction with some cost-cutting layoffs, so we scrambled to design a migration path for the community. Because the WELL billing service was in place, the simplest technical move was to bundle TT with WELL services.

We knew using WELL registration and access to gate TT was not a logical move socially, and not the most artful marketing approach, but given our resource constraints, it was the one strong alternative to closing the doors on TT altogether.

We also knew that even with a small fee, getting five to ten percent of the active userbase to stay after a shift from free to fee is a challenge. Five percent would have to be a viable scenario, and we felt we had a good chance at drawing that kind of support.

We closed down registration and set up a town meeting to welcome suggestions, valid and fantastical complaints, good-byes, optimism in the face of adversity and several weeks of general high volume top quality thrash. Since we were also doing design, implementation, policy and email support on the fly when this happened, it was a particularly intense time.  Some of the things we had wanted to do -- but felt we could not take on -- were requested by the community right away, and we couldn't resist doing them after all.  We found ourselves with a cumbersome non-automated gift certificate offer, for example. But our resolve to enable the community to perform community acts like pooling resources for scholarship funds was greeted with a good measure of respect and gratitude, so we felt it was a solid choice even with cut and paste data-flow scenarios.

Currently we're heading into the second month of for-fee Table Talk, and smoothing out many rough edges. It will still be free to read, and heavily linked from the Salon site, so we hope to continue to keep and to attract more commentators and communicators with the quick minds for which Table Talk is known. The site is noted for cultural commentary on current events, motherhood, film & TV, among other areas. We are seeing brand new sign-ups as well as conversions from free accounts, even though the registration interface is not where we want to end up. This is a great sign, leading us to believe we can weather initial churn and grow from here.

Tell me what you've learned about business models and online communities? (I'm sure you could write a book!)

Why, thanks, Jim. I do like to talk about this stuff, as you know!

Frankly, I loved having Table Talk free and ad-supported, with a professional staff of between 2.5 and 4 during the time I was responsible for it. The quality was great. The barrier to entry was low but not zero -- we attempted with a fair degree of success to block free email addresses and require a workplace or ISP account to register, for example, but did not charge for entry -- so people from many countries and backgrounds felt they could afford to participate. And we disallowed multiple identities, again to the degree we could, so we had a lot of continuity and genuine bonding whether people posted with real names there or not.

Table Talk was a shining example of a free forum site. It just failed to pay for itself after the peak of the Internet advertising boom.

But the horrible truth is that even if ads rebound fully without the number of sites competing for them ramping back up, too, they are an iffy way to support a community site. Advertisers may still be nervous that some extreme interchange might break out when their banners are visible and they would be subliminally associated with disturbing behavior or verbal images. Or worse, that their usually primitive and boring banner ads will be savagely critiqued. Internet advertising has not graduated to the level of top quality TV or radio ads which are often funny or interesting enough to hear more than once.

Furthermore, there is something so innately engaging about dialogue, especially when you know the participants and have any kind of stake in the outcome or information, that you are dealing with a serial medium, with the ads on the margins simply invisible. It's like having a discussion in your kitchen with the radio playing softly and your friends talking. Will people fall silent and shift their attention to the commercials when they come on? Almost never, no matter how hard-hitting, funny or celebrity-studded the commercials are. The conversation group is real, the radio ads are canned. And that is how a good online forum feels. Real people, freeze-dried ads.

Subscriptions are tough after being free, and they will exclude some folks, but they do take the support from where the passion is, and they can offer stability in contrast with some other revenue streams. There's only such a thing as a free lunch if someone else pays for it, after all.

Outside of the business successes or challenges of your communities, what are other characteristics or innovations that are particularly noteworthy?

The WELL was my first online home, as a subscriber in 1990, and from 1991 as a member of the management team. I was drawn to it in part because of my background in both theater and grassroots advocacy, and the obvious powers of interactivity and improvisation the medium combined with that profoundly creative core group of WELL people.

The core group does change, but part of the appeal of the WELL is that some of the interesting characters who were there in 1985 are still present sixteen years later. This gives a depth and texture which brings us all the complex pros and cons of a large club, extended family or small town. For contrast, we offer the option to create whole new areas open to the WELL overall or private to a given group, and promote another round of evolution and new in-groups. In terms of software that functionality is not revolutionary. It's the gestalt of the social intelligence of the subscribers which make simple options like private conferences or "indies" -- like Obsess.ind where obsessions from television to germs are played with and explored -- such compelling places.

Table Talk is in such an interesting point of evolution right now. The gift certificate culture, the predictable "we won't pay refugee sites", the adjustment to a reduction in posting volume is amazing to watch. I'm so glad we do see people signing up despite the creation of free spaces such as several on the  demo site set up by our good pals at Web Crossing, who wholesale the software TT runs on. That's an interesting dynamic, since it's not the software but the people who make an irresistible community, but some subsets of the people set out to find themselves similar software elsewhere.

Another interesting dynamic is the subset of TTers who have intense dislike of The WELL, a place which is so similar in many ways. This proves the premise that the two places have strong cultures. You couldn't expect to merge London with Paris, but some people would love to be residents of both for one rent check. And some people are visiting both The WELL and Table Talk daily, while others mutter about "those people."

As you look into the future, which trends do you find the most promising?

A "Public TV model" of sponsorship plus voluntary support from some 
of the userbase may work for some sites, and would be a good thing to try
with a slightly different economic backdrop.  I hope to see some larger sites experiment seriously with that combination. But it would take a sponsor who could take pride in being associated with a reasonably broad scope of free speech without promising that anything goes. I believe we'll have sponsors who get online community and want to be there, but so far unless it is an institution running its own commerce or political site, that kind of sponsor support for whatever people want to talk about is seldom seen.