We’ve become increasingly fond of Ning - an online, largely free platform for creating social networking sites. Despite not providing the most flexibility for customizing content or design, the Ning platform does allow for quick and easy creation and editing of a complete social networking site - lots of tools to add blogs, forums, photos, videos, status messages, akin to Facebook or Myspace.

Projects on which we’ve worked recently include:

• The Creative Core Talent Network (whose Come Home to Syracuse affinity group replaces several earlier versions of the CHtS sites we produced);
• bookcollaborative.ning.com, a site to promote Bradford Wheler’s newest book Snappy Sayings, with goals to collect content for group-authored books down the road;
• and Green NY Campus, a site from the C&S Companies to support continued discussion and action from their April 2009 higher education sustainability conference.