We are the knights who used to say Ning!

Well actually that title is misleading, not many people seem to say Ning any more, and it is a Silly word if you ask me.

From what I read online it seems that Nings were a lovely free way to set up community websites, but they then ran out of cash and demanded payment like the drug pusher who gets you hooked before raising the price and this annoyed a lot of people.

So rather than concentrating on one failed platform I will talk about all the other lovely community sites you can make, particularly those that have impacted me, which are free forums, wikis and sites like google docs.

Frankly these days one is spoiled for choice when it comes to the creation of information sharing sites and it seems to be mainly a choice of what features you would like to allow users.

While ning may have had it al in one package its not really that hard to link to a free forum or free wiki from your free website.  Its a little messy with URLs but I guess if you want perfection you can just pay, I looked at Ning and some of the other sites listed on the page linked to from the State Library's Library Learning 2.1 site - Phil Bradley's Weblog - Alternatives to Ning. and some of those do design a site to your specifications.

Basically Ning and its fellow community site tools as well as the other ways to publish or form a community on the web for free, such as Blogs, Facebook groups, Google tools (Docs and G+ tools) mean it is getting easier and easier to set up a website.  Nings have the benefit of looking professional and they are not too expensive but there are many options, and no excuses for any organisation with a community to serve or marketing to undertake not to have a useful web presence.