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 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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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?” ) ...
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 ...
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 ...
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