I’ve enjoyed my time putting Knewmismatic together (Don’t worry about it, I’m working on more) I’ve always thought that the collector sites were horrible. They fell into a few categories: great information, but painful to look at / navigate. Or not much information, just feeds and ads. The last category of sites was the dealer / auction sites, tremendous variance.

I have many examples; it’s not best vs. worst.

1. The “best” auction house website is a headache. (Just b/c you can do it, doesn’t mean you should.),
2. I still can’t see one dealer’s site who has a lot of coins in my specialty b/c the site does not support basic web standards. I use Mac OS’ Safari Web Browser.
3. Hint, you should not have to worry about site visibility anymore if you implement basic web standards. We fixed this problem in 2002.

The one thing I did well (not by accident):

Strategy: I knew I wanted the site to be focused on collector education. I had a broad definition of education.

What’s out there for collector eduction

1. Forums:PCGS Forums as the best example. No need to duplicate that.
2. What I thought was missing was the combination of user contributed work (wiki),
3. social interaction (flicr / reddit)
4. a place to learn a specialty. I choose patterns and varieties. I think it’s the least understood part of numismatics and can really help collectors know what they have and what’s out there.
5. It’s also the most fun, involves history, solving puzzles, understanding the minting process etc….

Here’s one of the best books on the community topic:

Art of Community

This book is available for a free download, get it, read it, love it. It is written by a technical team, but it is not technical. The principals they apply here can apply to any community. Great book, buy the hard copy too.

O’Reilly always has a few good books: Building Social Web Applications

So, I’ll start of the blog congratulating my self and the rest of them, I will tell you what I did wrong, I’ll have a lot to say on that….

As always, thank you for your time and consideration.