Roditelji.Me: The First Montenegrin Parenting Online Community
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Being a parent isn’t easy and every tip you can get is more than helpful. But where should you look for them? Books can tell you a lot, but the market is full of many titles that will get you nowhere. Sometimes you need the advice right now.
Many of you will find a number of online communities talking about parenting, helping fresh moms and dads with their kids. Roditelji.me is one such community, helping out the parents all across the Montenegro.
Parenting 2.0
Roditelji.me (roditelji, Montenegrin for parents) is a site for every parent in Montenegro and the whole of Southeastern Europe. Although it won’t be too helpful if you don’t understand the language, it is a nice example of a topic-based community. Considering the language barrier and a little more than a year of active work (site launched in October 2010), over 2,500 users make a respectable user base.
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The site itself is the first of its kind here in Montenegro and is updated daily with a bunch of tips which will help you handle some issues you might be having with every aspect of your kids. Ten-year old and still sucking his thumb? Chickenpox? Or your youngest wants some cookies and you’re looking for inspiration? Roditelji.me will help you with that.
You wanted to say something?
The real power of community comes in the form of a blog; once you register for a Roditelji.me’s account, you’ll be able to contribute to the site with your own experiences in a form of a personal blog with your posts.
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Create a post and send to the editors of the site for a review. Once approved, your post will be published in the Blog section of the site where the other parents will be able to comment and leave feedback.
I asked Duško Mihailović of Roditelji.me about their future plans:
Our plans for 2012 are to focus more on our activities within our NGO which will result in the creation of more useful and helpful content for the site. The site itself will get some new functionalities as well.
Forums Are Still Winning With Expert Advices
Of course, there might be some situations that require the experts opinion; you can get it via Roditelji.me with their Ask an Expert contact form. Contributing experts will gladly help you and write down the answer to Rodtelji.me’s knowledge base.
Although social networks like Facebook are taking over the Internet, it seems that a specific topic and an active community can (and will) keep you there. This parenting site also has an old-fashioned forum where parents talk about different topics. Would Facebook groups be a better choice? It’s irrelevant – the public goes where the quality content is. Technology itself isn’t important in cases like this.
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Roditelji.me is a fine example of a site with useful and helpful content and it’s showing that even today, when people identify Facebook with the Internet, it is possible to create a large online community.
Even in this virtual world, Roditelji.me team managed to gather parents with their kids in real life as well. Thanks to the site, they have successfully organized a New Year’s party for the kids!
Are you a 2.0 parent?