Timothy Noah’s editorial I’m Being Wiki-Whacked in the Sunday, February 25, 2007 Washington Post (registration required) tells the sad tale of one author whose biographical entry in Wikipedia may be deleted because a Wikipedia editor has determined that it is not “notable” enough.
All in Business Models
The Belgian court decision ruling that Google News violates copyright when it publishes information from contributing newspapers without first obtaining permission is a reminder of the precarious nature of much of the information flow we take for granted on the web.
“Most Folks Belong to Several Communities” — this is one of the points made by Jeremiah Owyang in his discussion of replacing the term “Audience” with ‘Community.”
Who Is Writing and Reading Online Tech Magazines?
Dian Schaffhauser’s post If I Were Editor… in Sourcingmag.com’s Blogosphere takes online magazines (such as eWeek, InformationWeek, InfoWorld, and CIO) to task for an interesting reason:
Overlapping and Evolving Online Communities are becoming the Rule, Not the Exception
I received an email last night from a reader of this blog asking me to comment on cost estimates he had received for the development of a new social networking service. He wants to offer targeted services to a specific but large population segment.
His thinking corresponds with a lot of interest people have these days for applying social networking techniques in a profitable or meaningful way to different population groups — young people, old people, professionals, managers, sports enthusiasts, podcasters, jobseekers, lonely hearts — you name it. If there isn’t already a MySpace/YouTube/Linkedin clone targeting any group that can write a check or reach a keyboard, there soon will be.
Something happened today that made me realize I may be reaching my personal "tipping point" between the old world of desktop-centric applications and the brave new world of network-centric applications.
Without thinking, I scrolled down to the bottom of my laptop's screen, double clicked on the "always on top" Windows XP toolbar, and waited.
Professor Andrew McAfee has an excellent series of posts related to the application of “return on investment” (ROI) calculations to enterprise IT. His posts deserve a close reading. He gets some flack for seeming to argue against measurement, but as he explains in his second post, that’s not his point; he’s basically saying that too many business cases that rely on a haphazard or incomplete calculation of IT benefits are flawed, incorrect, incomplete, or self serving.
We hear a lot about the customer- and user-side benefits of Web 2.0 -- the collaboration, the rapid development and deployment, and the rapid formation of "communities" around common interests.
As a change from this it's a pleasure to read some clear thinking about the business models that support Web 2.0, especially models associated with open source, software as a service, and software as an "appliance."