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LAUNCH: The New Personal MBA Community

05 January 2009

Personal MBA Community

I’m happy to announce that a new community for Personal MBA members has been created: The Personal MBA Community. The Personal MBA Community will make it easy for you to connect with other self-learners, entrepreneurs, and businesspeople via social networking features, discussion forums, chat, and local networking opportunities.

How do I join?

You can sign up for the Personal MBA Community here – membership is free.

Wait – I thought the Personal MBA already had forums! Why the change?

The Personal MBA Forums have a long history: originally, this site was a forum, not a blog. The original forums were nice and simple, but didn’t have many features, making it difficult for people to stay on top of new discussions. I love the idea of helping Personal MBA members connect with each other, and it was clear that a change was needed to make this happen more effectively.

Alongside the launch of the 2008 edition of the list, I changed the forum software in an effort to make it easier for people to follow the discussions. Unfortunately, this change introduced a host of issues – most notably, automated spam, which took a great deal of time to fight. I’d much rather spend my time researching and creating content for the Personal MBA community than deleting spam and continually trying to stay ahead of the spammers via software updates, so it quickly became clear that a new approach was needed.

Local Group Organization

Another thing I’ve been wanting to introduce for a long time now is better local group organization. It’s sometimes difficult to find people in your area to chat with about these topics, and I want to make it easy for people to connect with each other in a central place. With the introduction of the new Personal MBA Community, it’s easy to form local Personal MBA groups, create events (with RSVPs), and receive notification when new members in your area have joined. It’s also easier to search for members in your area, as well as members in areas you’re traveling to, making it easy to connect in person.

What will happen to the Personal MBA Forums?

I’ll keep the old forums up for 3-4 weeks to ease the transition. Unfortunately, there’s no way for me to import discussions from the old software into the new community platform, so if there’s anything you’d like to keep, a quick cut-and-paste is the best way to do it. I’ve started discussions on each of the books in the Personal MBA Recommended Reading List, so if you have notes, you can transition those immediately.

I hope you enjoy this new experiment in learning together – see you in the Personal MBA Community!

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