New: Citysearch, a division of IAC, wants to build out Sidewalk.com as a local guide site, and instead of launching their own coding project is testing the crowdsourcing waters. Entrants get a shot at a $10K prize and (possibly) additional funding to realize the project. Here’s the outline of the contest: Continue reading »
Jul 012009
Mar 192009
I remember in the early days of the Web it wasn’t uncommon for a site to tell you that you could only view the site in a particular browser, or that if you didn’t have a specific resolution you might not see everything. Eventually, web designers figured out that rather than telling the user how to browse, they would design for the user and ensure the site rendered correctly in the major browsers and most common resolutions.
Jul 272008
Crowdsourcing has occasionally been an alternative to doing things the old-fashioned way by, say, paying an expert. While many indirect effects of crowdsourcing exist, there has been little direct impact on employees within a given organization. When Wikipedia let many thousands of users create its content, no professional writers or editors were displaced. Encyclopedia publishers didn’t all fire their staffs and start wikis. Travel reviews written by users haven’t put the big travel guides out of business, nor have those firms decided to cut staff and let travelers do all the work. An interesting post by Tom Foremski at ZDNet describes one of the first examples I have seen of one company cutting paid staff to let users do the work for free:
Dec 182007
Got a brand new website you want to promote? Wondering how to get traffic and improve Google rankings? Google’s webmaster Svengali Matt Cutts clued us in at the recent Pubcon in Las Vegas: start a blog. (You were expecting, maybe, “buy a bunch of links?” 
) Matt pointed out that WordPress was mostly pre-optimized for search engines – the latest versions reduce duplicate content issues, page structure, titles, etc., fit Google’s recommendations, and keyword URLs are easy to generate. We’ve been blog advocates for years, but Matt’s blunt recommendations was still a bit of a surprise. Let’s look at why adding a blog to a new (or even old) site can be a good idea.
Oct 042007
Every community operator knows that it takes different kinds of participants to be successful. Some people come looking for answers, others come to help. Some like to expound at length, while others say little. Some are lurkers, others are prolific contributors. Researchers from Cornell and Microsoft have produced some interesting research that graphically represents different community roles.
Sep 202007
Online community builders love to toss around gross numbers – twenty thousand members, two million posts, and so on. Amid all the statistics, it’s important to recognize that all community members aren’t created equal – some are a lot more prolific. In Why Users Create Content, we cited a McKinsey research brief, How companies can make the most of user-generated content. In addition to offering reasons that explain why users post content, the report also included interesting data showing that a small number of users are responsible for creating the bulk of the content on most community sites.