Dripping Dagger likely to expire with changes to Ning.

On May 4th Ning will do away with all of their free online communities to focus 100% of their efforts on their paying customers.

There are tons of educational and non-profit accounts, and silly boneheads like myself who thought that Ning's tools would be great for creating a forum or community.

I like these tools that Ning offered for myself as I attempted to create a sample online book club:

A bit of customization for your site without knowing HTML

Discussion forums that are simple to use both for an administrator and a new user.

The ability to add videos of authors.

Events calendar

A blog which can be used to explain how the forums and other parts of the site work, to let people know about other topics and new books coming out. It could be used by anyone in the group to share information or write book reviews and recommendations.

A drawback to the site is that there are trashy ads along the side. They apparently charge $25.00 PER MONTH right now to remove those.

I'll wait and see what comes on the fourth of May, but I suspect I am not going to think that the plan is reasonable.

Some articles with alternatives:

Phil Bradley's Weblog: http://philbradley.typepad.com/phil_bradleys_weblog/2010/04/alternatives-to-ning.html


Mashable Ning: Failures, Lessons and Six Alternatives http://mashable.com/2010/04/18/ning-alternatives/

Ask Jack Blog (Jack Schofield, the Guardian) http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/askjack/2010/apr/28/ning-social-networks-google-apps