Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

I am trying to find other sites where people discuss topics as seriously as here at SuN, but I just cannot find anything.

For instance, I am looking for a place to discuss Real Estate Investment and another one to talk about Stock Market.

Do you guys know of any reliable sites that can be used as a source of basic and advanced information?

Thank you.


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Andre Costa DaCosta Chocolates, LLC www.DaCostaChocolates.com

I do not have any recommendations which of course defeats the purpose of my responding.  But the light went off in my head - "Ooh, a problem!"  If Andy can`t find good sites, does anyone want to solve it by building one?  I smell potential web business.

Hi CampSteve,

And I got all excited with the possibility of someone responding to my question!! Such a tease...

Anyway, maybe this is just the nature of the beast, as there are some sites out there with communities on various topics. The problem with most of these sites is that there are no active moderation, so after a while people seem to give up on spending their time trying to giving or receiving any relevant information, considering all the spam received.

I tried www.tribe.net and www.orkut.com. I don`t think myspace.com or facebook.com would offer anything like what I am looking for.

But there must be something more specific (such as a site for Real Estate Investment only) where I can find what I am looking for, but by simply Googling it I was not able to find anything.


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Andre Costa DaCosta Chocolates, LLC www.DaCostaChocolates.com

I think part of the success of a great social network is the company`s ability to oversee and nurture it.  So many of them are failures because they are set up and then left to fend for themselves, with the naive notion that the community does all the work.  Successful ones appear self-sufficient from the outside but they aren`t.

Anyways, I do in fact have a recommendation.  I recently heard about ning.com, a site that offers template social networks where anyone can set one up on any topic.  I visited there once and the problem is there are tons of non-active networks, especially ones with only one member who is the person who started it.  And I don`t think they are moderated either.  (The site is not a bad web business concept but for the reasons I just stated, I think it is destined for failure.  But who knows.)  Anyhow, you might do a search there to see if there is one that picked up steam.

Thank you, CampSteve.

The problem you noticed with ning.com is the same I found with the other social network sites - people just don`t visit the communities! Or, because of the lack of moderation (mentioned before), the topics become too off-topic ("See me naked on cam" and stuff like that). That`s a big turn off for people who actually would like to exchange experiences.

I should probably change my approach and start looking for sites which main focus is, for instance, selling real estate and see if they have their own little communities...

Again, thank you for the follow up.


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Andre Costa DaCosta Chocolates, LLC www.DaCostaChocolates.com

Andy, If you subscribe to this e-zine, you`ll get all the leads to the forums you want. Dien Rice scours the various business forums and lists the most interesting posts on many of them. The real estate ones are usually in the last several listings. This is one of the few e-zines I have subscribed to for more than a few months! I find Diens` work a most valuable resource... it saves me a ton of time... and has done so for years.

http://www.sowpub.com/ehotsheet.htm

So far as the stock market forums, I`m lost there... I don`t know of any that have any measure of credibility. The ones I`ve looked at are all aimed at selling you something, and that`s always the flavor of the day. Sorry.

Nick