Most web communities are built with lots of help from volunteers - forum moderators, review writers, members who report problems, etc. One of the more common tales of woe told by online community operators is how, in an effort to reward the contributions of these volunteers, they somehow demotivated ...
In the early days of Web commerce, brick and mortar stores were thought to be threatened with extinction. Amazon.com, the pioneering Web bookseller, even turned into a verb briefly: “getting Amazoned” meant having your business taken away by online sellers. Of course, retail stores didn’t go away, Barnes ...
When Google announced its Google Book Search project, publishers and authors closed ranks to protest their work being indexed by Google. Although loss of revenue was ostensibly the big concern, perhaps more than a few were concerned about their plagiaristic tendencies being exposed. An article in Slate by ...
Yesterday, Google (GOOG) shares closed at $500 for the first time. This is a significant milestone, and the real question is whether Google shares are worth that much. Its closing price of $509 represents a P/E ratio of almost 65. That may not be as bad as ...
Web community operators should chill an extra bottle of Champagne for the upcoming holiday. I haven’t had a chance to review the full decision yet, but it appears that the California Supreme Court has taken a big step by extending free speech protection from internet service providers to their ...
Last week I did a couple of presentations (on Community Building and Competitive Intelligence) at WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon, and caught the opening keynote session by Guy Kawasaki. Guy is a funny and engaging speaker, and a good choice to kick off a conference that covers a broad range of marketing, ...
Ahhh, the joys of user-created content. Why pay for professional writers and researchers when your users will create it for you? Nobody has exploited this key Web 2.0 concept better than Wikipedia, the massive online encyclopedia created by thousands of volunteer contributors. The content has been surprisingly ...
Now, music lovers can become angel investors, too. A Dutch site, Sellaband, lets new bands upload music where site members can listen to it. If a member likes a band and thinks they have potential, he or she can “invest” in the band in the amount of ...
