So what is Building43?

To quote their About us page again…

The goal is simple – make it easier for businesses to use the new Internet to improve their business results.

It’s a Rackspace owned website with a celebrity blogger at the helm of it — Robert Scoble. The ultimate purpose is to sell hosting, which is perfectly fine.

Scoble calls it a community too on his About page:

I work at Rackspace and am building a community for people fanatical about the Internet called Building43.

Don’t call it a community, please

Call me old fashioned by to me an online community still means a forum or chatroom where one can sign up and initiate discussion or participate in existing discourse, where your role is defined by what, how and how often you say things.

At Building43, instead, your role has been determined from the start:

But building43’s foundation and future is its community — people like you who contribute valuable content, through video, blog posts, podcasts, Friendfeed comments, Tweets or by simply dropping us an email to tell us about the latest or next great thing. Participate now. We can’t do it without you.

In other words, to participate you have to contribute content via the latest web 2.0 cleverness (eg. Twitter, FriendFeed). Which is more about social marketing that than giving users space to express themselves.

Building43 is a blog

It looks like one, reads like one and behaves like one.

And it would be great if they added a forum of some sort.

Now that I’ve made that clear I’ll go ahead and bookmark it because it promises to be a pretty useful resource.