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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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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A key aspect of Web 2.0 is letting users create or enhance a site’s content. This sounds great, but in practice can be hard to achieve. The Web is littered with dead forums, unreviewed products, spammed-out wikis, and other failed attempts to build user-created sites. Consulting giant ...

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The concept of crowdsourcing - letting a bunch your users create your product, or at least enhance it - is a staple of Web 2.0. Now, we see that European social networking site Mister Wong is crowdsourcing their corporate identity by holding a logo design contest. The contest ...

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Every company is interested in online community and Web 2.0 functionality today, and retail giant Sears is no exception. After seeing a post by Bill Green at Make the Logo Bigger about the retailer’s first effort in this area, I can only conclude that Sears outsourced their community development ...

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The good news is that companies, even big ones, are waking up to the power of online communities, and that they are taking steps like starting their own communities for discussion, ratings, reviews, and social networking as well as participating at other sites. The bad news is that sometimes ...

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Since the early days of Internet-based communities and chat rooms, individuals found that they could invent new online personas for themselves. Unencumbered by real-world details like physical appearance, social status, and their back balance, they could “be” themselves and interact with others doing the same thing. In most ...

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As a blogger, have you ever wished that you had journalistic immunity? So that when the feds knocked on your door to find out where you got the unreleased product photos or the tip about your congressman’s freezer full of cash you could just say “no”? Well, the ...

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Conventional wisdom is that web-based applications are the Next Big Thing. Current apps like Salesforce.com’s CRM show that critical business data and processes can be outsourced to third parties and be accessed via a Web browser. Email providers like Hotmail, Google’s Gmail, and Yahoo Mail have proven to ...

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