The dust has settled after my back to back Web conferences in Austin: WebmasterWorld’s Pubcon South, and South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, and I thought I’d take a minute to compare the two. I’ll start by saying that any such comparison is beyond apples & oranges… the two conferences ...

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Fast Company has a good article on the growing use of user-generated content to provide guidance on restaurants, hotels, and just about everything else. The article focuses on the challenges faced by various review sites in balancing freedom of expression against the need to curtail bogus reviews generated by ...

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A Motley Fool post about Twitter reminded me, of all things, of an ancient WSJ article about the popularity of guayabera shirts. I dimly recall that the article spent a long time discussing the comfort and business acceptability of the guayabera, but then closed with a punchline that went ...

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The title of this post might sound like a Bill O’Reilly sound bite, but it’s not. As a long-time community guy I suppose I should have known what a “fisker” was before reading Reality Check by Guy Kawasaki. I didn’t. “Fisking” is responding to another individual’s email ...

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Although the Stanford Web Credibility Guidelines are a few years old now, they are still a great starting point for anyone trying to boost their web results - ecommerce orders, business inquiries, and so on. While some of their ten guidelines seem obvious - “Make it easy to contact ...

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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 ...

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I’m a great believer in the power of communities to generate great information by crowdsourcing. I have to admit that I’ve been too busy to spend a lot of time at Sphinn, a sort of Digg for SEOs/Webmasters. When I have stopped by, I’ve invariably found some links ...

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It’s been a long while since I posted here, and I apologize to those readers who noticed. It’s been an interesting time in the last few months, including the sale of a major community website and taking on some new responsibilities in the post-sale environment. I have been ...

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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?” ) ...

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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 ...

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